Nature at its best with the change of seasons (From Gazette & Herald)

Nature at its best with the change of seasons

ONE of dad's old country sayings was "As the days get longer the cold gets stronger" and this has certainly been the case this year.

The nights are certainly getting much lighter this month and it has been cold and wet and very miserable even though we have not had much real winter weather.

Last month I was beginning to think we were going to get a very early spring and was wondering if I should take a risk and put some fertiliser on to the grass fields to get some early growth in the hope of an early turnout for the cows and some cheaper production costs for the milk.

Then a frost or two put things on hold and commonsense clicked into gear and I checked the silage clamps had plenty of food in reserve and decided to be patient. Thank goodness I did because one of the coldest days this winter followed. So the fertiliser is still in the shed and I shall have to wait for warmer weather before we can turn the cattle out.

The birds too are still feeding hard at our feeders and three years of hard feeding has produced a wide and very varied collection of birds in the garden. We feed in modern plastic feeders for the small birds, feeding monkey nuts in three feeders and sunflower seeds in another.

In addition to this, we put breadcrumbs on to the bird table and small wheat on the ground under a fir tree at the top of the garden. Our reward for this regular feeding regime is a constantly changing variety of wild birds all through the hours of daylight.

Some of them like the nut hatches, robins and blue tits are waiting every morning around 8am for the sunflower feeder to be filled up and then the numbers and the different varieties build up and empty that feeder by dinner time when they turn their attention to the monkey nut feeders which are always kept topped up and keep most of the different breeds feeding happily all day long.

The breadcrumbs are the favourite food of the robin and the blackbirds, but some of this gets dropped onto the floor and gets licked up by my old Labrador Trapper who nowadays has free range around the garden. A larger spotted woodpecker comes occasionally but he seems to be very shy and disappears at the slightest sound or movement.

The wheat attracts its own regular feeders and two or three different groups of pheasants wander through the garden during the day for a feed. They too come with first light and always walk and only fly away if they are disturbed by Milly our Jack Russell terrier.

We also used to get a lot of grey squirrels but they hogged the feeders and drove the birds away and so had to be dealt with. We also get rats at night who climb up the trees and jump down on to the nut feeders taking a lot of nuts and destroying or sometimes stealing the feeders. This was easily dealt with because Milly seems to be able to either hear them or perhaps scent them when they come after dark.

When I turn her out she will jump and bark around the bottom of the bird table and I can usually manage to shoot them with the aid of a torch and the air rifle. They must, however, sit in the laurel bush sometimes waiting for us to go to bed and then Milly tries to climb the trees to get them out. Life is never quiet at Lodge Farm for long, especially with dogs like this one. She is not able to talk but can certainly make her self understood when she thinks I should know about something.

Quite a lot of our birds are pairing up now and the first we noticed was the robin who now allows his mate to share his place on the bird table. The swans and geese are back on the ponds and the ducks have been paired up for a few weeks now and will soon be nesting.

Hopefully they will have better weather when they hatch the first broods and there will be some insect life for the first broods of ducklings as they hatch off, but even then only a few will survive because there are too many predators around.

Carrion crows and magpies sit and wait for both early eggs as well as early broods of little birds and it is only when the grasses and cover begins to grow that some of them will then survive to grow up and take their chances in life.

Nature in the raw is hard and cruel and only a hard and equally cruel line on predator control will have any real effect on our wild bird population and as long as there is a ban on killing hawks and owls and badgers there will never be any real increase in the numbers of song birds we see in our gardens. (Have you noticed how the numbers of hedgehogs have reduced since badger numbers increased?).

My feeding station in the garden certainly attracts the little birds, this morning a flock of more than 40 greenfinches arrived and began to take over the seed feeder, but it attracted sparrow hawks who come most days for their breakfast, dinner and tea which I arrange to be available in our garden free of charge every day.

This is nature in the raw and perhaps nature at its best and all truly organic. The sparrow hawk left a pile of green feathers behind but his friends soon forgot about it and began feeding again.

Updated: 08:53 Wednesday, March 22, 2006