August 2022
It is early July as I write, and Uckfield is full of fledged birds hungrily looking for food. Now is a good time to put out those bird feeders to help them succeed in the competition for food. I always advise against using peanuts because these can choke and kill nestling birds. However, I do use sunflower hearts which are ideal and popular with many species of birds, and can still be purchased. They can be pricy but it is worth it.
Birds visiting my ‘squirrel buster’ RSPB feeder includes nuthatches, blue, great and coal tits, greenfinches, goldfinches, robins, house sparrows, great spotted woodpeckers. Blackbirds, song thrushes, dunnocks, collared doves and wood pigeons pick up crumbs on the ground dropped by other birds. There are more resident birds at this time of the year in Britain than at any other time because of all the fledglings, but their numbers are regulated by food abundance, and will decline.
There has been a dramatic decline in the numbers of insects in Britain recently, I admit that I do not have the precise answer as to why. Even many predominantly seed eating birds require insects when raising their young, so this is very worrying. Possibilities include the overuse of insecticides, climate change, aerial pollution and disease. I monitor 46 blue tit nest-boxes in Lake Wood every year, and I am pleased to say that 36 boxes were used by pairs of blue tits to breed in. However, many boxes had one or more dead chicks left in the nest which indicates that the parent birds had difficulty in feeding all of the nestlings, leading to brood reduction. Blue tits feeding nestlings require an abundance of moth caterpillars that in turn feed on oak tree leaves. They often lay an extraordinary number of eggs. The largest clutch that I have recorded in Lake Wood is 14 eggs. They lay one egg per day for 14 days. However, they can start incubating those eggs at any time during those days such that eggs laid after incubation start hatching later than the rest that were laid before incubation started. The consequence is that late hatched nestlings are smaller than the others, and are sacrificed if food is scarce.
All we can do is try to care for all levels in the ecosystem so that we fit in with, rather than dominate, the wildlife that shares our planet with us.