Yes-pecks' in Wild-bird Seeds Mixes

 

Some years ago we helped a little with a project to measure the feeding success of an increasingly uncommon Australian Wader, the Little Curlew. A number of us watched a small flock of these birds feeding in different places in NW Western Australia. We recorded each time they probed the turf they were feeding on; each unsuccessful probe was noted as a ‘No Peck’ and a success when the bird was seen to swallow an item of food, was recorded as a ‘Yes Peck’.

Thus, ‘Yes Peck’ passed into our family collection of privately useful terms , and an interesting, successful or pleasing event became known as a ‘Yes Peck’.

This autumn, after a few unsuccessful visits to a couple of local fields where wild bird seed mixes comprising fodder radish, sorghum and linseed, and  which had in the past given us excellent views of big flocks of linnets and chaffinches, this year had only produced distant, very flighty birds in light too poor to identify anything.

So, recently, at last, a ‘Yes Peck’!

The sky was clear, the sun bright and we ignored the chill of a fresh NE breeze. The wind was blowing straight into the first field so we quickly crossed the road to the second, which at least in the corner, was sheltered by a few tall trees and a thick hedge.

Sheltered corner beside a crop of fodder radish.

A tangle of drying fodder radish plants with a big crop of puffy seed-pods, and dead thistles, was hosting a scatter of restless birds. They flew up from the field, into the hedge and tree-tops in a continuous cycle of movement.

Lane between crops of wild bird-seeds mix.

Glimpses of white wing-bars showed us the main birds were chaffinches, but when we turned the car so that we could see the birds in the tops of the trees down the lane alongside the seeds crop with the sun on them, we could see the colours and markings clearly. Indeed, most of them were hen chaffinches with a few males. Among them was one male greenfinch and a couple of streaky linnets with deeply-forked tails.

Cock Chaffinch

      Hen Linnet with deeply forked tail.

After deciding we weren’t likely to see anything else we moved on a couple of miles to another farm in the parish with another seeds mix. Yes! There was a lot of bird feeding going on here too and we again picked a spot where we could watch the birds as they flew up into the bare ash twigs of the hedgerow trees alongside the seeds field. There too, the most abundant birds were Chaffinches. Then, perching in the very top, the sun shining brightly on his yellow head, was a cock Yellowhammer,

Cock Yellowhammer, a bird we see much less of these days.

And then, enjoying the sun’s warmth, a couple of handsome cock Bramblings with bright chestnut shoulders and grey-streaked heads. We hear that huge flocks of Bramblings have been moving down the north-west coast of Scandinavia and N. Europe and some are now moving across the North Sea into Britain. This is a bird we can occasionally see here at home, but with gaps of several years between sightings.

                             Cock Brambling.

A good morning, with several pleasing 'Yes-pecks'.!

A good-sized crop of Fodder Radish

This crop was alive with Small Tortoiseshell and Small White butterflies when flowering in the summer. These wild bird seed mixtures in their different varieties are valuable for the invertebrate life they attract earlier in the season, such as Bumble Bees, grasshoppers, hoverflies, spiders. More big flocks of finches are feeding on the seeds now, almost invisible down in the tangled growth but flying up to perch in the nearby hedgerow trees when disturbed. The light was once more too poor to identify more than a few but they seemed mostly to be Chaffinches.