A couple of weeks ago I left my trail cam set up on a bird feeder in the apple tree in my garden, and for a week I’d totally forgotten about it. Some 6000 photos and videos later (it was rather a windy week, so the majority were of leaves…) I’ve managed to sort through, identify all the birds, and begin to put it all into a video which I will put up soon on my videos page. Unfortunately my trail cam is a bit faulty and doesn’t record sound, which is a shame – I would have loved to have heard some of the exchanges around the feeder – but nevertheless there was a fair bit of interesting behaviour and a diversity of species that I didn’t expect from my garden, so all in all I’m pretty happy with the results!
The species I had visit the feeder include robin (including juveniles, which I never realised had such a beautiful plumage), dunnock, blue tit, woodpigeon, magpie, greenfinch, a juvenile goldfinch, a family of great tits and a charming family of house sparrows who I’ve grown to love. As you can see in the video the sparrow family often feed together, and it looks like the parents brought up 3 chicks. They rarely ever bring all 3 to feed – usually just 1 or 2 – and although the juveniles are clearly capable of feeding themselves they do tend to act a bit spoilt from time to time and complain until the mother feeds them. The other interesting thing I noticed is that the juvenile robin (or robins) doesn’t appear to like landing on the feeder for long if at all; it sometimes even hovers by the feeder to feed.
Today I spent a lovely afternoon chasing foxes around my neighbours’ front gardens and taking photos of them (the foxes, not my neighbours). While I realise I do probably look like a bit of a weirdo, luckily the foxes were kind enough to stick to areas away from people’s windows so it didn’t look like I was taking photos of people inside their homes. I managed to get a nice photo as one poor fox was startled by the sight of me peering at it from behind a bin – a behaviour, you might say, echoes the typical behaviour of the urban fox!
Tom Richards 