AnnMarie's Blog

The local squirrels are in fine and mischievous fettle this spring. The grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) can breed twice per year, with the first mating season beginning in spring. After mating the female will drive the male out of her chosen tree, where she will give birth about 6 weeks later, in a drey on some high branch. The mother will carefully rear her young for about 3 months before chasing out any hangers on and then starting to prepare for her next litter.

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Squirrels can make themselves unpopular with foresters by stripping bark from trees. They do this mainly in spring time to get access to the sweet sap beneath. Mind you, bird feeders are of course a very convenient snack bar, laid on solely for the benefit of the squirrels. Mischievous & playful the grey squirrel was introduced to Britain in 1877 from North America. It is about 30cm long with an extra 20cm of tail and can live for up to 8 years.

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Foraging is an extremely important part of a squirrel’s life; in autumn they will bury nuts to save them for the winter. They don’t always remember where they put the nuts and so sometimes help the trees by nicely planting a new tree. It’s quite surprising the rate that these little guys can put away the food, read the rest of this post to see a video demonstrating this:

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These beautiful little birds, a garden favourite here in the UK, have been having a tough time in the recent spell of winter weather. The British variety is in fact a sub species called “Erithacus rubecula melophilus”. Several Robin’s have been visiting our feeders and I thought I’d share some recent pictures …

Click on any of the images to see a larger view.

Robins breed in parks, gardens & woodlands. They enjoy eating snails & worms and whilst they will take seeds, a nice tub of mealworms is what they’d really like to find at your garden feeder. Robins are fiercely territorial and with both sexes being similarly marked, mating time must be fraught with confusion! Both genders sing a warbling song that is used to advertise territory, you may be able to distinguish the song in my video at the end of this post.

You can read more about the Robin on either the Wiki or RSPB websites.

As mentioned I also took a brief piece of video, just expand this post to view it …

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As promised here is the video short that accompanies my post about the Kites at Gigrin Farm, from last Wednesday.

I’ve adjusted my video export settings for upload to YouTube, I think these are better – hope you agree.

As usual this post is split to assist quicker loading of the site, so please click continue to reveal the video …

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This spring we added a new feeding station for our wild birds. It seems to have been quite a hit, especially with the youngsters. Some of them are very quick to get to grips with things, like the sparrow fledglings; others aren’t too sure at first, like a certain little blue tit.

Anyway I’ve pieced together a short (~3min – 10Mb) video for you to take a look, just click the link below & then the play button …

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I’d like to include a few videos on my Blog so this is a short one for starters. Tamsin & Snowy were practicing some jumping earlier on this year (March), this is a clip of the video.  Click more to view.

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