• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

They've Gone

Rod

Rod

Old Oak
Joined
Jul 21, 2014
Messages
4,471
Reaction score
0
Location
Winchester, Hampshire
Our local House Martin's that is [emoji20]

Saw them grouping up a few days ago and was quite surprised they were still here after the massive thunder and rain storm the other night.
But no signs of them yesterday and today - wonder how many will make it back from Africa next April?

Rod
 
The swallows are gathering here, too. They'll soon be off. In fact, I can't see them today so they've probably gone already.

My daughter, a zoologist studying animal behaviour, is a keen ornithologist, and has recorded 51 species in our garden since christmas. For a garden which a couple of years ago consisted only of a hedge and some grass, and is surrounded by an arable field, that's quite a thing, I reckon. The highlight (for me anyway), was a cuckoo.......often heard, but not so often seen, and they are having a really tough time either in Africa, or somewhere on the journey. Numbers are declining rapidly.
 
I haven't heard a cuckoo for years now - there was a feature about them on TV a few weeks back. Their favourite bird to "trick" with their egg laying is the Reed Warbler. The egg they lay matches the "proper" ones very closely. The cuckoo chick will push out any eggs or hatched chicks so it's they only one left. It mimics the sound of a brood of hungry chicks so the poor "parents" never stop feeding it.

That's a lot of species - I feed the birds quite regularly but never get anywhere near that number - probably 30 odd?

Rod
 
Haven't seen a swallow, house martin etc for a week or two here.

51 species is a great count. I thought we were doing well with 31, either in of flying over, the garden, including a cuckoo which I would not have noticed had it not been "singing" in flight. One of the more unusual was a woodcock which was sat, unmoving, on the front lawn for several hours. We moved it under the hedge and left some bird food and water nearby and it either recovered and flew off or was predated.

We also log mammals, 8 so far in the garden and a further 4 within 100yds, including a small group of young boar drinking in the ponds at the end of our road.
 
Now you come to mention it, I think our House Martins and Swallows have gone.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top