Wednesday, 1 December 2010 Some of the birds in the garden and at the birdtable today

As usual when it’s snowing or too icy to venture outside I sit by the woodburner watching the birds at the bird table until I can’t just sit any longer, I have to get the camera in my hand and start photographing them. It’s that sort of day, and it has been snowing the tiniest flakes all morning, which haven’t really been doing anything except masking the birds a little.

I brought out some seed bags today which I bought from Wiggly Wigglers in the UK. I tipped a variety of seeds into a container and then promptly dropped it on the kitchen floor. My fingers don’t always work as well as they might and I think I have hold of something but I don’t. It took a while sweeping them up from a luckily newly washed floor. I poured them over the tiny bits of cut up bread soaked with breakfast’s bacon fat from the pan, and golden sultanas which were already on the bird table.

I never seem to be able to photograph magpies, as they are off at the very slightest movement, but was lucky with this one on my gates.

Next is a great tit on the variegated holly bush, which the blackbirds have already stripped of berries.

My opposite neighbour has her entry in the telephone directory in her maiden name, Pinson, which is French for chaffinch.  This chaffinch has a beak full of seeds.

Next a sparrow on my snow-covered wall.  I seem to have taken this in the only morsel of sunshine we have had today.  It's very, very cold out there.

They - whoever they are - say that robins are territorial, but I have two here who share the birdtable, without fighting, but I have never caught them both there together on camera.  I can never resist robins.  I just love them.

And blue tits come a pretty close second. 

Here's a male blackbird, possibly one of those who has been stripping the berries from my holly.