Amateur Gardening – 20 July 2019

16 AMATEUR GARDENING 20 JULY 2019

Bandits at work

T

HIS year the Best Beloved and

I have decided to keep filling

our birdfeeders throughout the

summer because we’ve had so

many baby birds this year. The parents

are finding plenty of wriggly caterpillars

and bugs for the young, but they’re

coming to the birdfeeders to find food

for themselves. We have had great tits

feeding fatball crumbs to their babies,

but mostly it’s parent birds topping up.

We’ve also got a family of wrens and

the four or five babies, too fast moving

to count accurately, often squawk in the

evening. Our wrens don’t visit our

birdfeeders, as they feast on tiny insects

and are quite fearless in their quest.

They will enter the coldframe and go into

the wooden greenhouse to find food.

There was a terrible kerfuffle the other

day when one baby got trapped in the

fruit-cage netting and had to be gently

released. The parents were making loud

clicking and whirring sounds, despite

their diminutive size.

At the other end of the size scale,

we have problems with jackdaws and

they’re such clever birds. One will shake

the feeder and chuck the peanuts down

to its friends below, emptying the whole

container within minutes. I find myself

springing up and yelling at them, but I

frighten the Best Beloved more than

Jackdaws are far from the bird brains many people believe

them to be, as Val discovers how clever they really are

I do the jackdaws! These sleek

members of the crow family are far from

bird brains. They’re obviously working

together and, in the past, tame jackdaws

have been trained to do tricks. Some

Italian thieves apparently trained theirs

to swoop down on unsuspecting folk

using cash machines.

Jackdaws have a large brain, relative

to their body size, and they’re the only

corvids (members of the crow family) to

use nest boxes. Researchers have been

able to study them and they’ve found

that they mate for life and raise their

young together.

A recent Springwatch programme

highlighted some research carried out

on birds’ brains. A team of scientists

compared 49 common species and

analysed their songs. It’s the higher part

of the brain that controls cognitive and

learning functions, like learning songs,

while lower brain areas control more

motor functions – such as chucking

peanuts to your friends. It’s no surprise

that jackdaws chirrup rather than sing.

Some bird species have complex

songs. The blackbird has 108 syllables,

the skylark has 341, but the nightingale

tipped the chart with 1,160. Springwatch

showed one male nightingale being

recorded at Reading services (Junction

12) on the M4, singing away into the

TIP

Use squirrel-proof

feeders. We’ve had an

acrobatic grey squirrel using

our feeders as a trapeze. His

preferred food is sunflower seeds.

night to attract a female. The services

are not far from a series of gravel pits

at Theale, home to 100 pairs. There

are 25-30 nightingale territories

close to Hosehill Lake, a nature

reserve managed by the Berkshire,

Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire

Wildlife Trust (BBOWT).

However, wildlife sites are no longer

sacrosanct when it comes to building

homes and new railways, like HS2.

There have been applications for

housing on the Theale site, despite

it being a floodplain. Commonsense

prevailed in the end, helped by

vociferous local opposition. That’s

a good use of citizen science.

“Jackdaws have a

large brain relative

to their body size”

“One jackdaw will shake the feeder and chuck

the peanuts down to its friends below”

Gardening We ek

with Val Bourne, AG’s organic wildlife expert

All photography Alamy

Bandits at work

Jackdaws are far from the bird brains many people believe

Some bird species have complex

songs, with the nightingale topping the

chart with a repertoire of 1,160 syllables

Jackdaws are the

only members of

the crow family to

use nest boxes