Fledgling Starlings to come

Recently, we bought some live mealworms for the birds, thinking it would be helpful for any nesting birds to feed to their chicks. Well, we have certainly had a positive response from the local Starlings. They have been flying off with beakfulls of mealworms for a couple of weeks now. I think that there are at least 4 adult starlings flying off with food to feed chicks. With the frenzied feeding, I am sure it won’t be long until we see some fledglings.

A while back, we got a couple of plastic green mealworm feeders with little covers and steep sides. Before this, we were always trying to find somewhere A) protected from the weather, and B) somewhere they couldn’t simply crawl off. As a result, many of the mealworms we wasted. It seems that now, the problem has been solved and the mealworms have been disappearing fast.

The Starlings have been seen deliberately spilling the mealworms onto the lawn so that they can collect them more easily. The video below shows a Starling collecting some mealworms and flying off with them. Note how the Starling quickly flies off with the mealworms before the second starling is able to take any! I was so lucky with the way one Starling replaced the other when recording the video.

Another ineteresting sighting in the garden has been a juvenile Dunnock. I also managed to get a clip of this too, albeit a short one. After watching this clip a few times, I thought the juvenile Dunnock could in fact be a very scruffy adult Dunnock. See what you think. I must say though that the Dunnock does appear to beg for food from the parent. This “youngster” appears to be able to feed itself, so I don’t think it is a recent fledgling.

Now, I also wanted to talk about a very strange encounter in the garden yesterday. In the late afternoon, I saw a small flock of Long-tailed Tits visit the garden. Fairly normal so far, then. But I then saw a pair of the little birds hanging around near our conservatory nestbox. To my surprise, they actually entered the nestbox for a short time. I have certainly not seen this kind of behaviour before from this bird, although I know that Long-tailed Tits are beginning to exploit food from a wider range of feeders. When you look at the list of birds which use an ordinary tit box, the Long-tailed Tit is not part of the list. It would be great if the little birds visited the box again at some point, and maybe even thought about a late nesting attempt there.

To finish off, below are a couple of pictures of Collared Doves seen in the garden recently They seem to have learned how to feed off our bird feeders now!

Hopefully I will see some more fluffy youngsters over the coming weeks.