Just another lazy Sunday

Robin

Last night I'd hit a creative writing streak that I didn't want to break and ended up not going to bed until half-five so despite its being a sunny day after a phenomenally wet night I didn't much feel like going out and about. Having no public transport available today limited the options quite a lot, anyway. 

I spent a while fidgeting about again, watching the squirrel evict the spadgers from the sunflower feeder, then the spadgers ganging up on the squirrel until it got fed up and moved on, the spadgers descending on the feeders, the coal tits barging the spadgers out of the way and the blue tits and great tits chasing the coal tits off and the spadgers evicting them. It's an odd sort of pecking order but it seems to work to everyone's advantage in the end. The long-tailed tits descended on the fat ball feeders — they prefer for the magpies to have had a go at them first because it makes for a more crumbly surface.

Juvenile house sparrow

The road seems to have been settled as the border to the robins' Winter territories, "my" robin singing in the back garden and sometimes coming into the front to sing from the rose bushes, the school's robin favouring the elderberry bushes by the school fence.

Lostock Park 

I had another wander round the park which was predictably busy with people and equally predictably quiet of birds though at least there was a goldfinch squeaking in the bushes by the bowling green this time. The robins were very vocal though the territories they seemed to be defending were tiny, about the size of my back garden.

Leaf gall mite on lime leaves

The search for bats at sunset proved fruitless, there was a decided nip in the air. The station robin wasn't shy of answering back to the songs of "my" robin and the school robin. "My" robin's territory seems to include the field and the couple of houses on the edge of the field, the steamroller's garden is a definite flash point, at least two of the robins laying claim to it.