Remember to feed the birds

  It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but it is so cold and has been snowing a lot and some of our garden friends may have a little trouble finding food and water. Throughout the winter we ensure all our feeders and the bird table have a good supply of many different types of food the children have even helped make some bird feeders and they really enjoy watching the things each type of bird will take.

  I took this photograph in our garden today, the children were very surprised to see a blue tit's tongue, not something you see everyday. If you click on the photograph it will enlarge, so that you can see it's tongue close up. I think the nuts look a little frozen though. This is not only helpful to the birds and a way of giving back to nature but it is also educational and a great way to really study the garden visitors.

We have been wondering what happened to this starling today, it is difficult to see in the photographs but it looks like it has a strange hump on the back of it's neck, maybe from an injury. It's feathers stick right out at right angles sometimes and don't go flat.

Here it is in another photograph, it looks quite odd but the bird had no trouble feeding or flying, so it can't be seriously hurt. I did notice in another photograph that it had a toe missing too!

 It doesn't have to cost a lot of money to feed the birds either many of the things on the RSPB list are kitchen leftovers, as you can see here. If you want a guide to see how to make some bird feeders and also some other photographs of our garden birds see my husbands blog here.