Home thoughts

It's encouraging to see that the pair of coal tits are still visiting the garden and haven't moved on now the weather's becoming like Spring. The male's been singing a lot from the little tree by the station so I'm hoping they'll stay to breed. A pair of long-tailed tits, with a hanger-on, pass through the garden three or four times a day but the pair of great tits, though still around, seem to go missing for days on end. The blue tits aren't hanging around long either. I heard the first blackcap song at the station the other day. This was the first blackcap of the year for me, the last wintering blackcap in the garden was on New Year's Eve.

One of the local starlings has an excellent imitation of a blackbird in its repertoire, finishing it off with a pitch-perfect common gull squeal. Another seems to have heard an oystercatcher on its travels and liked the noise it makes, sticking it incongruously into the middle of its most ardent bubbling and squeaking.

The change of seasons is most apparent on the school playing field opposite. There's usually been a few dozen black-headed gulls and a handful each of common and herring gull throughout the Winter, lesser black-backs being pretty infrequent. Last week there were a couple of days when there was a hundred or more black-headed gulls on the field, this week it's just odd ones and twos. On the other hand there's a definite passage of lesser black-backed gulls going on though they're mostly flyovers with just odd ones and twos stopping for a short while before moving on.