Boxing Day home thoughts

Himalayan rowan, Sorbus hupehensis, a street tree round the corner from my house.
It's not mistletoe but the local pair of mistle thrushes are firmly of the opinion it's their property. 

It's an odd thing: the sparrows descended on the back garden early on Christmas Eve and denuded the feeders and I've hardly seen them since despite my making the trip out to make sure they weren't short of sunflower seeds and fat balls over Christmas. One of the blue tits and a robin sat within arm's reach in the rose bushes waiting for me to finish the refill, dunnocks and blackbirds dived in quick for any spillage the moment I walked away.

The collared doves, woodpigeons and robins are singing every morning and there's a lot of canoodling going on amongst the jackdaws and carrion crows. Over on the school playing field the pairs of rooks pause in their feeding every so often to preen each other's ear coverts. The days are getting longer.

There's a constant crowd of black-headed gulls on that field every day between daybreak and half-twelve. Most days it's a dozen birds though sometimes it'll be as many as two dozen as birds drift in late morning. They'll all have moved on about two o'clock. The large gulls seem to know that school's out: there's been one or two herring gulls or lesser black-backs this week and all adults, the past couple of weeks there's been crowds of first-Winter herring gulls with the highest count being twenty of them. Most days there's at least one common gull loafing with the black-headed gulls. There's usually more common gulls on the primary school field by the park, it's less built-up round there which seems to suit them better. Back in the dark ages when I was a tiny tot and those fields were home to skylarks, hares and partridges, the common gulls easily outnumbered the other gulls two or three to one.