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Collared doves
(The dead branches are a hazel I felled last Winter. I was halfway through chopping it up when I had to stop to avoid disturbing a nestbox. Which in the end got taken over by wasps so I'm waiting until Winter hits before finishing the job.)

It was a gloomy sort of morning and I was bleary-eyed after catching up with a week's sleep so I decided to thoroughly depress myself by listening to the cricket. Meanwhile out in the garden a couple of dozen spadgers made steady inroads on the newly refilled seed feeders with the help of a couple of the blue tits. 

I'd emptied the remnants of the cat's bowl onto a bird tray with some seed. The squirrels found it first, they were mithered off by a couple of magpies and they in turn were muscled off by four collared doves. Collared doves look sweet and peaceful but they're aggressive beggars and are only outranked by sparrowhawks, cats and foxes in the back garden pecking order. Even the carrion crows can't be doing with them, though if a couple caught a collared dove on its own in a tight corner I shouldn't fancy its chances.

Autumn is properly upon us and nearly all the leaves are off the rowan tree and I can see that all that shade I was worrying about is cast by two branches of railway embankment sycamore. I'll do a bit of trimming of the rowan myself, I'll have to get someone in to have at the sycamore branches (the trees themselves are Network Rail's). Although in many ways the sycamores are a damned nuisance they provide the local birdlife with a feast of insects. Enough of the leaves have dropped for me to be able to catch the goldcrests gleaning in the tops.

I bobbed over to the Trafford Centre to check out the gull roost on the vacant lot by Beyond. Just a couple of dozen black-headed gulls today and a steady passage of lesser black-backs overhead and not stopping.