A Week on the Estate: Medieval Craft, Bird Census & Nearly Spring
It’s hard to believe but we’re barely two weeks from meteorological spring. While we’ve had plenty of unseasonable mildness across winter, with early flowers drawing out confused bees and butterflies, we’re well and truly ready for brighter days and green shoots. We can only hope we don’t have a repeat of last spring, with late and persistent frost disrupting all sorts of jobs across the land, not least the happy task of introducing new Lincoln Red calves to our pasture.
The Saturday Club took part in the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch a few weeks ago and the results are in. They took a few pics of Hall Cat Marmite apparently helping them tally up, but what was he really up to? Perhaps he was cooking the books to conceal some behaviour that was less than bird-friendly, or else he thought he was consulting a menu.
If you did the Big Garden Birdwatch, we hope you got some good numbers. The Saturday Club got very serious about our local bird census – they had two teams either side of the lake, a team at each of the large bird feeders and one on the suet ball. The conditions were mild verging on warm so the feeders weren’t as busy as usual, but here’s what they got:
Garden birds – 6 x blue tits, 5 x robins, 6 x jackdaws, 3 x magpies, 9 x blackbirds, 3 x house sparrows, 1 x chaffinch, 3 x coal tits, 3 x wrens.
Waterfowl & others – 154 x greylag geese (!), 55 x Canada geese, 30 x mallards (11 male, 19 female), 2 x coots, 1 x pheasant, 1 x buzzard.
