I am doing bird notes this time as Paul is on holiday. April is the time of year when one records the first appearances of our summer visitors - but many were quieter than usual, and who can blame them? They have flown on their tiny wings all the way from sub-Saharan Africa to arrive in unseasonal cold and wet with few insects about. By the end of the first week in April the willow warbler had joined the chiffchaff in the chorus at (the excessively muddy) Seven Bridges. Swallows were swooping over barns by 7th April, and house martins in large groups over the river a little later. And rest assured, the cuckoo is here again, but, at the time of writing, keeping mighty quiet. I have heard just the odd ‘cuckoo’ over the marshes towards Littlecote, and others have heard one in the Mill Lane area. As for the swift, they have normally arrived by the first days in May, but I still hadn’t seen any by 6th May. Doubtless they are coming, but lingering in places where food – aerial insect ‘plankton’ - is to be found.
But the great event in early spring was the unusually large numbers of siskins and redpolls visiting our feeders. I had never even seen a redpoll in the village before, but this year there were up to four of them on the feeder, including breeding cocks with a lovely pink flush as well as the signature ruby-red patch on their ‘poll’ (roughly, the forehead). Possibly these seed-eating small finches were driven to the feeders because the wet had made it difficult to extract small seeds from the wild.
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