Quite a while ago, I bought 150 fat balls at a very reasonable price. The only problem is that the little darlings (I mean all of them, not just the starlings) wouldn’t touch them. Well, they would but with great reluctance. So, I thought of a wheeze which I thought would fool them, the little darlings that is.
What did I do? I mash them up and put them on the bird table. Now I have another problem. It seems like the birds (and this time, it is mostly the starlings) May prefer ground-up fat balls to the other main staple I put on the bird table, peanuts – ground up of course. if I start the week with a clean table, by the end I have a table with a layer of residue that is mostly peanut. Time for another experiment.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
We wanted a bit of a relax so we went to Lee on Solent for an ice cream. We parked in the main sea-front car park and went for a stroll. We stopped off at the newly refurbished National Coastwatch Institute (NCI) coastal watch station. NCI would have been a prime choice to volunteer if I hadn’t gone with RAYNET. Unfortunately the move to Dorset means that NCI is out of scope and I’m not sure about RAYNET anymore. That though is a separate conversation.
We had a very nice ice-cream. We were leaving the car park when we saw a large puddle, with a flock of starlings around it. There were about a dozen of them all lined up taking a bath. They were fluttering away splashing themselves. It really was quite beautiful to watch.
Luckily, there were no cars behind us, so we weren’t holding everybody up as we paused to watch. I would have loved to take a few more photos or a video, but I really didn’t want to disturb them. I just really relished watching them.
Bills Posts 