Whilst we’ve been locked down, we’ve spent a lot of time in the garden – thank goodness the weather gods have been shining down on us…..a rarity in the UK normally, but nothing about this time is normal! We live in the middle of a housing estate, but we do have a decent sized garden. There are quite a few small trees in the garden and we’ve always had birds nesting in it, but this year we’ve had a chance to pay more attention.
Wow! We have had a lot of birds visiting our garden! We had first Mr Robin (Robbie), then Mrs Robin (Roberta) and now two baby robins too (Ronaldo and Ronaldinho – I should point out it’s Portuguese Ronaldo not Brazilian Ronaldo!).
We’ve now got baby blue tits too, which are all fluffy and very cute! There seem to be quite a few of these, including Becks!
There’s a baby pigeon in one of the trees, being very well looked after by it’s attentive parents. For a while, I was worried that mum wasn’t going to have a baby since she’d been sitting on her nest for weeks and nothing appeared. Then suddenly we saw a baby head pop up next to mum’s in the nest – joyful.
We have regular blackbirds, and sparrows flitting through the raspberry canes picking off bugs every evening. We’ve seen a red kite and a buzzard overhead and a lesser spotted woodpecker on our TV aerial. We also found our first frog of the season – my husband usually finds them when he’s mowing the lawn!
Now, we usually see blackbirds, pigeons and blue tits flying by, but I’ve never got friendly enough with a robin for it to seemingly look for us – and pose when I have the camera out!
Or watch baby blue tits begin their first steps of independence. Or ask a squirrel politely if it could wait until I got my camera….and for it not only to wait, but come a bit closer to me for a better shot!
What I really can’t believe about all this though, is that normally we miss most of it! Normally, we’re racing from one place to the next, glancing out the window occasionally. Normally, we haven’t got time to wander around the garden for hours with cameras in our hands. And perhaps normally, we don’t place enough importance on it.
Hopefully, from now on, we spend more time just being in the garden and making friends with the wildlife. Perhaps our new skill after all this will be recognising different bird song and learning to slow down a bit.
Take care x
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