On March 5, while I was home preparing breakfast, I got a phonecall from a birder that tends to visit our forest bird-feeding station almost daily. He reported that someone had wreaked havoc with the seed-bins sometime between his last visit the morning before and this morning.
Great. That's a first that we'd rather been without, that's for sure :-(
So I ate my breakfast and drove over there as fast as I could manage, and parked at the roadside opposite Tweety's as usual. The damage could be seen from there. The outer bin (we have 3) was toppled over, the lid was in 2 pieces and a lot of the sunflower seeds had spilled out on the ground.
I filmed the sorry sight with my phone, tried to get an overview of the damage and deemed it possible to undo, mostly. Then I went to work to do just that, since I don't have any way of filming myself, that heroic work went undocumented ;-)
The tipped bin was buckled in and had gotten a long tear, so I had to empty the suet & tool bin and swap places and empty the seeds into that one. I could scoop up most of the seeds from the ground, since it had been a dry spell, luckily for us. It's quite typical we just had bought 60 kg sunflower seeds and filled the 2 seed-bins to the brim just a few days before...
Anyway, I used one of the least broken old extra lids instead of the totally vandalised one, we had to buy new ones. We always have one or two extra, they break easily when it's freezing cold and the squirrels tend to gnaw on them, trying to get to the goodies.
After all the clean up was done I spent some time watching the birds, of course. We get to see the Crested Tit well (Tofsmes), for once, always a bonus! The same could be said about the Coal Tit (Svartmes) :-)
The male Eurasian Siskin (Grönsiska) sang up a storm before descending to the ground for a snack. The female Great Spotted Woodpecker (Större hackspett) was already down there, extremly busy pecking through the top layer of seeds and dirt. I don't know what she was after, but it was of great interest to her!
The Eurasian Nuthatch (Nötväcka) shows up for some intense feeding visits, then had to take a breather during wich I had ample time to film it. The European Greenfinches (Grönfink) were around, as always, I only filmed a well hidden female. Then a nicely colored male Common Redpoll (Gråsiska) showed up and I forgot all the other birds for a while, before returning my focus to the Siskin. The European Robin (Rödhake) made a fast visit, picking some crumbs from the ground, before disappearing again.
The video ends with some footage of my favourite female Common Blackbird (Koltrast).
15 окт 2024
