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Rooks and a magpie, Lostock School

There's definitely a tinge of Winter about and it's not just the cold, clear nights. The rooks on the school playing field are starting to pair up: there's a lot of exaggerated strutting about and there's been a lot of "What about that for a throat patch, ladies."

Most of the leaves have fallen off the sycamores on the railway embankment so I've now started to be able to see the titmice as they bounce past. It looks like I've been getting three blue tits in to the feeders, not two. 

The first flock of wintering starlings arrived the other day, twenty of them settled in the tops of the sycamores for a few minutes the other day. I don't know that these are the same birds we have breeding here in Summer. They move on in late Summer and we don't tend to get the crowd scenes back until the cold weather.

Highest weekly counts for starlings in my back garden 2000-2021

I've had to chop most of the Mahonia down because it got attacked by a fungus so there'll be one less attraction for the wintering birds. Having said that, there is one string of flowers arising straight from the remaining trunk and there are plenty of shoots at the base of the plant so all is not yet lost.

When I was looking at gull statistics the other day I got to wondering what the goldfinch stats in my garden would look like. The good news is that they're still fairly regular visitors, with a drop-off in Autumn when there's an abundance of natural food out there for them. The unsurprising bad news is that I'm not getting them in the numbers I used to. 

Highest weekly counts for goldfinches in my back garden 2000-2021
(Highest = 24)

Highest weekly counts for goldfinches in my back garden 2016-2021
(Highesr = 12)

I don't understand the crash in numbers of visiting juveniles in particular. In part it could be because my garden's more well-grown (or overgrown, you pays your money and takes your choice), it may be they're being muscled out by the spadgers, it may be there's just not as many goldfinches of any age around as there used to be. To test this last hypothesis I had a look at the stats for my local patch. To my surprise all the peak counts there have been in the past five years. And also that the pattern is completely different to that of my garden. 

Highest weekly counts for goldfinches in my local patch 2000-2021
(Highest = 68)

Highest weekly counts for goldfinches in my local patch 2016-2021
(Highest = 68)

I've no explanation for this difference at the moment. A few more years' worth of data from Humphrey Park allotments (half a mile the other side of the railway line) might be helpful, at the moment there's not enough to be much use.