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[Daniel Quinn]

shoot it

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

The feral pigeons love her, as they are a close species and can mate. A big male who already had two females in tow was courting her (they dance around puffing their chests out like little Marcos ). I shot him

I find if a group of them try to adopt my garden there is normally a dominant male, shoot him and the others don't come back. There are ridiculous numbers of them now and they take over if you don't control them. The other problem is Magpies and we had 10 of them as a gang with our garden as part of their territory (they will attack and kill if they can non gang members) and they were killing and eating all the small birds. I shot 7 of that gang and a few stragglers from other gangs. So three left and that is a more normal number the garden can cope with. I shoot from a bedroom window and if the Magpies are feeding as soon as they see me or I rattle the window they are off. And we now have LOADS of small birds from lots of species on the feeders, and still breeding because of the food we are providing.

I don't enjoy killing them but it has put us on our local foxes Christmas card list But when we moved in the garden and area was dominated by feral pigeons, crows and Magpies and with only the Parakeets and the odd Robin as entertainment. Now we have a balanced bird population.

[AshM750.]

Ahh! Thats loverly.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

We have these breeding in the garden. Their first brood was killed and eaten by Magpies in the nest. They are just fledging a second lot now and it looks like all survived. And we got our first sparrows in the garden yesterday, the lack of them was worrying as they used to be so plentiful.

Nuthatch

[AshM750.]

Did you take that photo?

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

No of course not, I get them from the web. I just have a cheap Olympus C-170.

[AshM750.]

I was gona say, thats a good photo if you did.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

I don't need photos apart from for you lot to show what I am talking about. All I need is my window and I have a live show. The parakeets are still our fav, Nadia says standing in the kitchen cooking or cleaning with the Parakeets on the feeders (six is the record so far) she feel like she is on holiday somewhere exotic. The little birds are our second fav, they are like flying flowers, so many colours. The Nuthatchs, the tits both blue and great, including really bizarre looking bearded tit. I am not a bird watcher or twitcher, and I haven't a clue what they are until I look it up on the web, but they are giving me lots of pleasure to watch them just in small breaks from work, very meditative.

I just took this pic out of my window of Lovey Dovey sharing her breakfast with a Woody.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

These are still my fav. This is a male, the female doesn't have the coloured neck ring, but I can tell you in this species the females are boss.

[AshM750.]

These are still my fav. This is a male, the female doesn't have the neck coloured ring, but I can tell you in this species the females are boss.

Have you got one of them in your garden????