Superficial appearances to the contrary the garden is full of young birds. The amount of chance, luck and serendipity involved in actually seeing any of them is tremendous. I have to be looking out of the window at precisely the right moment to see one of them sneaking out of cover to grab a sunflower seed or a beakful of fat balls before immediately diving back to its hiding place. Identifications that during the Winter would take a second or so can take ten minutes as I follow the course of twitching leaves and branches and put together a jigsaw of feathered parts. Which gets complicated at times as they've formed a mixed flock of juvenile blue tits, great tits and house sparrows supervised by a couple of silver team cock sparrows and, occasionally, by old silver cheeks himself.
I'd written off the coal tits' breeding success so they brought two youngsters in yesterday just to show how wrong I was. They were very hard work, hopping about in the rowan tree while the parents showed them where the feeders were. Eventually they sallied forth and gorged themselves on suet while their parents terrorised the aphids on the blackcurrant bushes.
I've not seen any woodpigeons in juvenile plumage on the school playing field so far this year. It takes them about six months to get the white patch on the side of their necks so it would be a lot early for all of them to have got it. There's plenty of woodpigeon nookie going on out there so I'd think there must be some youngsters somewhere.
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