Juvenile magpie attempting - and failing - to fend for itself

 Magpies have nested successfully again in a hawthorn near the end of our garden and their fledglings, now well grown, have been harassing their parents relentlessly for food. Lately the youngsters have been showing signs of foraging for themselves and this one mistook the squeaky toy belonging to a neighbour's dog for a real dead animal.

The young bird circled its prey cautiously at first, pecked it a few times to check that it was dead, stood on the toy's head and then pecked and tugged it furiously. 

The attack went on for about ten minutes but, apart from pulling out a few threads, the attacker never managed to reach the stuffing of the soft, cuddly carrion 

It probably would have continued until it broke through the outer covering, but then a parent bird arrived and fed it some real edible food.

Hungry rook

 Fields here have been blanketed with snow, and the ground frozen rock-hard, for four days now, so these are tough times for birds like rooks, that normally feed on soil invertebrates. This one has been visiting the garden every day, using that pick-axe beak to hack away at balls of dough, fat and cheese. It's very cautious in this confined space, surrounded by hedges and trees, which isn't perhaps surprising for a bird that normally feeds in wide open spaces with a clear field of view. It never hangs around for very long.

When sunlight glances off those black feathers they have a lovely green iridescence.

Blue tits and long-tailed tits feeding on aphids

 Blue tits and long-tailed tits often seem hyperactive, constantly searching for food. A moth larva would be a good meal, but they also eat much smaller prey, picking off aphids that infest plants. The blue tit below was eating aphids from the stalks of a hogweed umbel. The long-tailed tits, pictured futher down this post, were feeding on the woolly aphids that cover the trunk and stem of a crab apple tree in our garden.

Individually, tiny morsels of food, but since the aphids feed on plant sap, rich in sugars, they must provide a significant energy reward.

Goosanders

 We encountered this female goosander and her nine ducklings, not long out of the nest, when we were crossing the footbridge over the river Wear at St. John's Chapel in Weardale recently. We caught her  by surprise, tapped between a low waterfall that her ducklings couldn't navigate and us on the bridge. 

Outside of the breeding season she would have taken flight in an instant, but she had no option but to stick with her flightless ducklings, swimming in agitated circles, with her ducklings clambering on her back. We moved on quickly, leaving her and her family to white-water raft down river and away to safety. 

This was a single-parent family: drake goosanders undertake a moult-migration to Norway while the duck is still incubating her eggs; he won't be back until late autumn.

I wrote about this encounter in the Guardian Country Diary this week.

Magpie fledglings

 At the end of January I wrote a post (here) about the conflict at the end of our garden between carrions crows and magpies, competing to nest in the same tree. Well, the magpies prevailed. They successfully dismantled the crows' nest, stealing twigs faster that the crows could add them. Now the magpies' first brood, an unruly bunch, are in the garden every morning and it's interesting to watch their development.

The fledglings are fairly easy to spot because their tails are shorter and more rounded at the ends than those of their parents.

To date, the fledglings don't seem to have much idea about how to feed themselves. They spend a lot of time pulling leaves off the trees, while the parents attempt to broaden their diet. 

A raucous fledgling calling for food (above) and harassing a parent (below). The longer, more slender tail of the parent is evident in the lower picture.

Occasionally, the parents will bring them meat, which almost always looks as though it must have been roadkill. Their offspring are sometimes not sure what to do with it. This one pecked at the meat, but then left it and flew away.

Many people don't like magpies because they have a reputation for taking other birds' eggs and nestlings, but much of the food that I see them carrying is roadkill - animals that people have killed with their cars. The abundance of roadkill is surely one reason why magpies are such a successful species - we humans, inadvertently, feed them. Hedgehog meat would be a rare item in a magpie's diet if it wasn't for the impact of motorists, but I often see magpies pecking at squashed hedgehog carcasses on roads.

Yellowhammers in the garden

 The recent freezing weather brought yellowhammers into the garden. Tree sparrows dominate the pecking order on the bird seed feeders but they are messy eaters and the yellowhammers loiter on the ground underneath, feeding on fallen seeds. 

In late winter the birds haven't developed the full sulphur-yellow breeding plumage but as spring progresses their colour intensifies. We have quite a healthy population of yellowhammers locally, much of it on land that was opencast for coal until about twenty years ago then restored to agriculture, with a mixture of new and old hedges and some broad verges along old lanes that provide some good feeding opportunities. All the photographs below have been taken during the last three years and show the birds singing their 'little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese' song, collecting nest material and, in the last two, performing a courtship display. 

I've only witnessed the courtship display once. The cock bird danced around on the ground with its wings drooping and vibrating, with its head feathers raised in a crest.

Dipper courtship

 I watched this pair of dippers courting along a stretch of the river Wear near Wolsingham in Weardale earlier this week. It's very difficult to tell the sexes apart but I'm pretty sure that's the male on the right, with his body stretched upwards. The female is fanning her tail and fluttering her wings. There's some brief wing fluttering going on in the second picture too. 

The distinctive white eyelid of  the bird that is blinking shows nicely.

Apart from this posturing, courtship seemed to mainly consist of the male pursuing the female up and down the river. Dippers always nest here, under an overhanging rock on the riverbank, and have a well-defined territory; rival pairs tend to confront each other at territorial boundaries early in the season, and usually turn back when they reach a rival's territory. They also sing with notes that are pitched at a level where they can be heard above the tumult of the river.

Well=groomed blackbird

This cock blackbird is one of a pair nesting in the holly hedge at the bottom of the garden. While the hen bird incubates the eggs he doesn't have much to do, until there are nestlings to feed, so he spends his days sunbathing, preening and singing, with just an occasional bout of violence when he needs to see-off a rival blackbird.

Sunbathing involves sitting on this flat concrete block, fluffing up his feathers and rocking from side to side to soak up the warmth of the sun, ridding his feathers of parasites. Sometimes he goes into a trance-like state, with his beak open and eyes half-closed, panting in the heat.

Then a long session of feather preening and scratching with his claws.