A Week on the Estate: Storm Éowyn, Jacqui’s Hawfinches & Farmland Feeding
We hope that Storm Éowyn left you neither shaken nor stirred last weekend. This record-breaking cyclone drew its energy from both a strong jetstream and the winter storm that brought blizzards to the USA’s Gulf Coast. Heavy rain and strong winds made mischief for us and many others across our region, but the brunt of Éowyn’s anger was borne by Norway, Ireland and north-western regions of the UK. Northern Ireland saw wind-speeds of up to 80mph, while ours peaked at around 50mph. After all that excitement, we’ll settle for the coming weekend’s dull but safe weather. We can expect gloomy overcast with maximum wind speeds around 23mph and a temperature range of 6C-1C.
Weather permitting, we hope you enjoyed the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch last weekend. Jacqui got on famously and her sightings included nuthatches, robins, long tailed tits, blue tits and robins. She also spotted a rare and special hawfinch again, this time a male in his winter finery. Repeated sightings of multiple hawfinches is brilliant news. In December’s BirdWeather stats, the hawfinch was our 44th most heard bird, with 39 activations. It’ll be interesting to compare this with January’s figures when they come out next week.
The hawfinch is a stocky finch around twice the weight of a chaffinch, with an outsize bill just right for breaking into hard-stoned fruit. This colourful lover of cherries, plums and beech mast is red-listed due to a drastic UK population decline, with the whole sedentary British population estimated by the BTO at only 500 pairs. We don’t know if Jacqui’s visitors are native or part of the 10,000+ winter influx from Scandinavia. Either way, they are most welcome.
Staying with farmland birds, Paul and Andy had a busy day last week setting up our new Perdix feeders around the Estate. Sited adjacent to hedgerows and close to winter bird-food plots, they’ll help to bridge the hunger gap and sustain our farmland birds till spring. Our varied and nutritious seed mix features white millet, red millet, canary seed, oil seed rape and sunflower hearts, and includes organic grains grown right here on the Estate. We’re planning to mix our own bird seed featuring 70% of our own organic grains and we may in future be able to offer our seed mix for sale at the Walkers’ Cabin. Watch this space for more good news!
