Lazy Sunday

Spadgers

The weather did change, the knee forecast it correctly. The cooler, greyer weather didn't stop Spring's carrying on a-sprunging. The great tits are taking turns to come to the feeders, the male announcing his arrival every time, the female almost creeping in. The blue tits are doing similar, which suggests they both have nests on the go. Apart from the occasional mid-morning song the coal tits have vanished from the scene, as have the long-tailed tits. Except they haven't really, two or three times a week I'll spot one of either coming to the suet balls by a very circuitous route via the conifers at the bottom of the garden and a low-growing Viburnum. The dunnock, the wren and the robin are singing and the starlings are nesting in next door's roof again.

Spadgers
The pine cones had been larded with suet and seeds, the magpies and spadgers love them and at this stage there's still enough bits of fat lodged in crevices to keep the titmice going. The pine cones lodged in the top of the feeder is to stop the squirrels taking the fat balls and running away with them.

As well as revising the songs of blackcap and garden warblers, and listening to recordings of lesser whitethroats so I don't think I'm mishearing chaffinches, I'm going to have to listen to a lot of recordings of hunting bats. Pipistrelles are straightforward because they have Morse code calls for echolocation and noctules sound like 90s techno dance tracks. Unfortunately for me there are quite a few species of bat that call on roughly the same frequency so when I pick them up in my bat detector I can't use that to identify them down to the particular species. Also unfortunately for me I can't read sonograms, or more pertinently I can't "hear" them, I've never been able to translate what I'm seeing on the sonogram chart into a sound or series of sounds in my head. I have the same problem with music, I can play the dots mechanically but I can't "hear" what they should sound like. So I'll have to dig around and listen to lots of recordings.