Home thoughts

Collared dove

I'm getting bored with wet, windy days in lockdown. I've worn the glamour out of going anywhere within walking distance in the pouring rain with the wind whistling up my trousers. It's a bad attitude: there's plenty about out there if you bother to look and quite a bit happening in its quiet, understated way, I'm just very bad at working to any sort of routine and the additional discomfort isn't helping.

Goldfinch

The spadgers are by far the dominant element in the garden at the moment, bursting out of the railway embankment to descend on the feeders mob-handed then going back in out of the rain for ten minutes to have a breather. The goldfinches are having to resort to slipping in to grab a beakful of sunflower seeds to eat in the tree away from the feeders. Even the starlings have barely got a look-in. The blue tits have been too busy chasing each other to get involved.

Collared doves

There are four collared doves in today: the usual pair, one of whom has pale tail feathers which for some reason have become startlingly white; the currently-tailless bird; and another bird which I think is the unpaired one I keep bumping into when I'm walking down towards the allotments.

• Black-headed Gull 1 overhead
• Blue Tit 2
• Carrion Crow 1
• Collared Dove 4
• Goldfinch 2
• Great Tit 1
• House Sparrow 16
• Jackdaw 2
• Long-tailed Tit 2
• Magpie 1
• Robin 1
• Starling 5
• Woodpigeon 2

Over on the school playing field there's just a couple of dozen gulls, mostly black-headed gulls with three first-Winter herring gulls and an adult lesser black-back. The four common gulls included one very striking second common gull with wholly black primaries and a dark wing band. I don't know what was up with the lesser black-back, it was very flighty and kept chasing other birds, including the young common gull, up into flight.