This year some welcome visitors have been a pair of collared doves which appear to have nested somewhere nearby. They are a far cry from their larger and bolder cousins the wood pigeon. Mating for life, these charming, imid birds now regularly haunt our garden. I really had to laugh, however, when they perched hopefully on top of one of the feeders just as the colder weather started to kick in. They looked totally bemused, as they had no idea how to get any closer to all that lovely food and had to resort to haunting the ground beneath, pecking up all the grain scattered there by those really fussy sparrows. Although they can be quite common in some gardens, we have in the past rarely seen them here and so it is lovely that they
are now around almost every day.
It has been hard to ignore all the rain we suffered last autumn and winter and now continuing into this year. It is becoming obvious that we are entering a period of meteorological chaos. The weather this year has been really predictable and yet none of this is new. I still remember back over 70 years ago my grandfather telling me that springs had become warmer and far wetter in his lifetime and how lapwings were nesting up to two weeks earlier than when he had been my age. I wonder what he would have made of the changing patterns we now live through and the rate at which it is all happening.
What a revelation my acoustic birdsong project has been. I have boosted our WIFI signal so that it now reaches the bottom of the garden and so can get an internet connection from indoors. There is now a live feed on Birdweather.com – in the top right click on Live Feed, then on the ‘+’ button to zoom in. Then locate Payhembury and click on the icon which will bring up a box with Birdnet-Pi Payhembury and another box to the left indicating
what has been recorded. I hope you enjoy it!
