Big Garden Birdwatch II

The safari is sat here with a bottle of bally awful but expensive-ish, well more than £3.99, Spanish vino tinto. There seems to be a musical theme to blogs today and Wifey is warbling away on her karaoke which has a scoring feature and if she doesn't get at least 98/100 we're miffed, not that it happens often. The family has just left after my younger bro helped make a log store and cut a months worth of wood for Little Bertha, now the hands are hurting like hell and even the alcohol isn't takin the edge of the pin - tomorrow is gonna be a bad day...not just the pain but first thing tomorrow we learn how deep the cuts are in our department and how many of us run the risk of losing our jobs - could be a painful day all round.

(Little bro is an alcohol expert and reckons there are two types of red wine, duff stuff that tastes of vinegar and posh stuff that tastes of Ribena, nothing inbetween; Lager, he reckons is just cheap Champagne, indeed he could be right; some lagers eg Czech Bud are better than even the £100 a bottle stuff I've been lucky enough to sample a couple of times.)

But on a lighter note please read Moore Patcher, Mark's blog from today, an exceptionally moving piece of writing

Just to keep you all up to date the Peregrine was seen yesterday and we had great views of the Fox early doors too.

This morning we did our hour looking through the bedroom window for the Big Garden Birdwatch:-

Herring Gull 8 - bread thrown on the garage roof just before the start

Chaffinch 2

Blackbird 3

Goldfinch 2

Blue Tit 1

Great Tit 1

Collared Dove 1

Robin 1

Actually better than we expected but could have done with Greenfinch making an appearance.

Later we had a flock of seven or eight Long Tailed Tits in the garden and interestingly they ignored the feeders prefering instead the Wombleton's bread thrown on the floor - unusual, anyone elsee had records of LTT taking bread or even feeding on the ground?

A mooch round Patch 1 at lunchtime gave us a big female Peregrine on the ledge follwed by a Great Spotted Woodpecker flying south at height. The garden with all the feeders was quite lively with Blue and Great Tits and a few Goldfinches. A Lesser Black Backed Gull was on the school playing field - a Patch 1 tick no less. The Golden Triangle also produced a Patch 1 tick in the shape of a singing Dunnock.

That's about it for today Garden list now stands at 21 and Patch 1 has moved up to 30.

Where to next? Back to Patch 2 for some goodies...hopefully.

In the meantime let us know what's on the ledges in your outback.