I feed all year round (and before next year I will have loads of replacement birdboxes for nesting)
A mixture of seeds, fatballs and peanuts, the latter mainly from wire mesh feeders.
(and gradually increasing the anti-squirrel feeders as I've now lost the local reds - most of the woods they used have all been felled and manky greys are here instead)
Sometimes feed dried mealworms when I can get them, the robins take them from a sieve attached to the corner of the greenhouse.
Also have window mounted feeders.
What do I get:
--- wrens, robins, blackbirds/thrush, blue-great-coal tits, gold-chaff-green finches, siskins, greater spotted woodpeckers, pheasants / red-legged partridges. Dunnocks and house sparrows. Most of which breed in the area.
* I also hear owls, curlews, lapwings but they don't visit.
Occasionally woodpidgins, jackdaws, magpies - all of which I try to discourage from the garden by making the food harder for them to get, but easier in the wood ...
you’re unlikely to get an owl in the garden (unless you’ve a fuck off massive garden). We have tawnies round here (took me ages to realise that the unidentifiable bird I was hearing was, in fact, a Mrs. Tawny (only the males hoot, very hard to describe what the females sound like). We have tits (great, blue, long-tailed (my favourite) and coal), dunnocks, corvids (carrion crows, magpies, jays and the occasional jackdaw), robins, blackbirds, wood pigeons, collared doves, pier wagtails (although not as many as we used to get - there used to be a row of trees in GX town centre which had hundreds, but the council chopped them down because people complained that their cars were getting covered in shit). In better times I used to spend summer evenings by the pond at the far end of the common watching the house martins gobbling up all the midges (GX is a shithole, but it’s lovely at that end (well, apart from the Canada geese, which can get really aggressive. People used to let their dogs swim in the pond, then the geese arrived (there was a story in the local paper about them mauling someone’s Yorkie)).
We also have red kites (although I’ve just realised I’ve not seen one for a while). Just thinking about all the species we don’t get here anymore, we used to have all 3 species of woodpecker, wrens, nuthatches, greenfinches, goldfinches, chaffinches, starlings, house sparrows and, decades ago, bullfinches.
there are also mute swans, mallards, and a heron on Latchmoor pond. There was a family of black swans, but they disappeared.
