Saturday 16 June 2007

The feeders

Well, i phoned SWT head office at the end of April, asking for permission to put up a couple of feeders on the reserve. Permission was granted.
We originally started out with a single seed feeder. The food went down, but slowly. We then added a large seed feeder and a small peanut feeder. It turns out that the peanut feeder was going down faster than the seed feeders.
As a result, we moved the seed feeders to a different location and ordered a large batch of peanuts and 2 more peanut feeders.
The seed feeders have started to go down a lot faster in their new locations. We've seen great tits on the small feeder and sparrows on the large feeder (although you'll note that there's no sparrows on the bird list yet... we couldn't identify if it was a tree sparrow or house sparrow at the time, since we couldn't see the head)
The small peanut feeder appeared to be getting regular use from great tits and blue tits.

Once the 2 new large peanut feeders arrived, they were swiftly filled up and placed near the original. Within 10 mins of being put up we had great tit, coal tit and chaffinch at them! 2 days later i had my first sighting of a great spotted woodpecker on one of them! That sighting in itself has made the expense totally worthwhile.

I'll be regularly updating with what i see on each visit, both on the feeders, the loch and the reserve as a whole. You never know. There might be more still to come!


One of the peanut feeders

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