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Garden Birds
By Janet | January 19, 2008
You don’t need to know anything about birds to enjoy watching them. Whether you’re watching small birds coming to your birdtable, or big birds of prey soaring hundreds of feet above your head, birds are everywhere - they are innately interesting to watch and provide pleasure for many people.
It’s a natural progression to go from enjoying watching a bird going about its business to asking yourself ‘what kind of bird is it?’ If you flip through the pages of a bird book you’ll see there are many different species in Britain (and more than 10,000 worldwide!).
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need expensive equipment or expert knowledge. The most important ‘tools’ are your eyes, ears and brain! All the other things are optional.Â
By following simple guidelines and principles, you can learn to identify any bird you come across. Every bird you see is different in some way and, if you want to, you can spend a lifetime learning about them.  The most important thing to remember is to enjoy watching and listening. Leaving food out for birds and keeping your feeding station hygenic and pest-free is essential.
Feeding birds in the garden is a popular activity - over half of adults in the UK feed birds in their garden. Providing birds with supplementary food brings them closer for us to marvel at their exciting behaviour and wonderful colours and rewards them for sharing this intimacy with us. Feeding birds is an easy way to start teaching children about wildlife.Â
Supplementary feeding cannot provide all of the natural proteins and vitamins that adult and young birds need, so it is important to create and manage your garden to provide a source of natural foods too, through well-managed lawns, shrub and flowerbeds.
By following a few simple guidelines we can all play a valuable role in helping the birds that visit gardens to: overcome periods of natural food shortage, survive periods of severe winter weather and be in good breeding condition in the spring.
Topics: Flora & Fauna |
January 20th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Could you let us know what those few simple guidelines are please Janet? you seem to have missed them off