It is cold and miserable if you are a bird here in Haarlem right now, except if you are a smallish bird within 500 metres of this house.
The bird restaurant is very busy every day – yesterday saw visits from the blue & great tits, a tree creeper, a robin, 1 jay, black birds, rooks, and jackdaws.
The rooks and jackdaws – fly away if they sense our movement in the house or if we roar out the window or rush through the door. The little birds seem to know that it is not them we are shouting at – and they stay and big birds rush away. I have just seen off 5 jackdaws. I don’t know how they manage to all be in our flimsy scrubby little trees at one time, because they are so big. What generally attracts my attention is the movement outside the window – the little birds do not make the branches wave about.
We think the rooks and jackdaws are okay because they scavenge everywhere and we feed them at the park and at the canals as well, when we are feeding the ducks, geese, swans, sea gulls etc.
We have tried feeding the wood pigeons in the park – but they are very shy and don’t come down to eat the grain until we leave. That’s okay. On Sunday we came back around the corner to a huge number of wood pigeons on the ground – so they are eating the seeds.
We think they love us – or they would if they knew we were the food source. We are delighted that our neighbours here have said they will take over the restaurant once we wend our way back to New Zealand.
We buy bird food at a stall at the Saturday market – and there are always people buying. On Saturday there were more people crowding around the Bird Food stall holder than ever before. It is even on the news that we should feed the birds and the people are feeding the birds on the bridges over the canals, in the parks, everywhere.
Bird food however is not tuppence a bag.
Tags: Birds, daily living, Restaurant, snow
