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It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Nuthatch coming down for seed as they tend to disappear during the breeding season and only reappear when the weather turns colder and food becomes harder to find. So, this sight last week was a real treat!
18 Monday Sep 2023
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It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Nuthatch coming down for seed as they tend to disappear during the breeding season and only reappear when the weather turns colder and food becomes harder to find. So, this sight last week was a real treat!
30 Monday Jan 2023
Posted birds
inTags
A Nuthatch doing what its name implies, eating nuts (though I have a feeling the name actually comes from the way the bird hacks in to a nut before eating it).
10 Thursday Feb 2022
Posted nature
inToday’s lovely long meander took me to Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, where I watched a large flock of Fieldfares and Redwings worming in the west paddock, enjoyed the antics of the almost-tame Crows that are feed daily by a regular visitor and now expect all humans to feed them, and chuckled at the small birds squabbling over which would get the sunflowers amongst the seed I dished out. The Nuthatches won that game most of the time, repeatedly nabbing two and three at a time to take away and stash for later consumption.
30 Saturday Oct 2021
With the changing of the seasons, some of the regulars who walk the fields and woodland at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park have started to leave food again for the birds, and this Nuthatch was just one of the many happy to take advantage of their generosity.
19 Thursday Mar 2020
Tags
bird with deformed beak, birding, birdwatching, British birds, Cogan Wood, European nuthatch, nuthatch, Nuthatch with deformed beak
During a recent wander through Cogan Wood, after a spell of nasty weather, I was dishing out sunflower seeds to all the small birds, the tits and Robins and assorted others, when I noticed this Nuthatch with an elongated and twisted beak. The deformity wasn’t stopping it feeding or carting away and stashing two or three seeds at a time.
October 2017, the twist is not very pronounced
I had a nagging feeling that I’d seen the bird before and, sure enough, when I checked my photos, I had images from two previous sightings, the first in October 2017, the second just a couple of months ago, in January 2020, always in the same spot in the wood. The twist was minor in the first photo but appears to have got worse as the beak has grown longer.
January 2020
Apparently, the Nuthatch lives about three years on average. Obviously, I don’t know how old this particular bird was when I first saw it but it will be interesting to keep an eye out for it to see how long it manages to survive. I hope it lives long and prospers!
March 2020
20 Monday Jan 2020
Tags
birding, birdwatching, British birds, Forest Farm, Forest Farm Nature Reserve, frost, Jay, nuthatch, Snipe
It was frosty white again this morning so, in the hope that the chilly temperatures might have lured the resident Snipe out of their hiding places in the reed beds, I headed to Forest Farm Nature Reserve for a meander. And I was lucky – though they were very distant, I managed to spot three Snipe. Full marks if you can actually see them in this photo.
Of course, the cold temps also meant the birds were hungry and frantic to be fed. I took plenty of seed with me but many of the good folk who walk this reserve regularly had already covered fence post tops and feeding tables with food of various types. This Nuthatch was stocking up, taking away several seeds and nuts at a time to stash in nooks and crannies in nearby trees.
Jays were also busy stashing. Birders were spraying the grass in front of the bird hide with peanuts, which at least two Jays were gathering and carting away to their local hiding places. Best to be prepared in case this chilly spell continues.
09 Monday Dec 2019
Tags
birding, birdwatching, British birds, Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, Nut warbler, nuthatch, Telor y cnau
The Nuthatch is such an entertaining bird, with its propensity to run, quite quickly, headlong down tree trunks.
Over the centuries, and throughout Britain, this very handsome bird has acquired a wealth of vernacular names. My Fauna Botannica lists the following: mud dabber and mud stopper (I’ve never seen one near mud but this, apparently, refers to its plastering of mud around the entrance to its nest); nutcracker, nutback, nut jobber and nut topper (it is rather partial to nuts); woodcracker, woodbacker and woodjar (it likes to wedge the nuts it collects in cracks in tree bark, to hold them firm while it attacks them with its beak); and jar bird and jobbin (‘to job’ meaning ‘to jab’, at the nuts).
In Welsh the Nuthatch is Telor y Cnau, which translates as Nut warbler. I’m not sure I would label its rather strident call a warble – to me it’s more of a trill, but that’s just my interpretation.
This particular bird was stocking up on the sunflower hearts I had put out for the small birds to snack on at Cosmeston today.
04 Thursday Oct 2018
This Nuthatch is pretending to be calm and aloof and not interested in the fact that I’ve just been dishing out food to the other small birds. But really …
‘Hey lady, have you got any seed for me?’
‘Maybe you put some in here.’
‘Nope. I don’t see it.’
Rest assured, it did get some seed. It just had to come down out of its tree to get it.
19 Monday Mar 2018
Tags
biodiversity, Blue tit, Blushing bracket, Brittle cinder, coal tit, Elfcups, Forest Farm, Forest Farm Nature Reserve, Great tit, Grey heron, Hairy curtain crust, Moorhen, nuthatch, Song thrush, wren
I’ve blogged about the charms of the Forest Farm Nature Reserve many times before but I thought I’d share some of the highlights from last week’s wander …
Oh, and I will just add that the combination of feathers – me mostly looking upwards – and fungi – eyes down – can be quite difficult. By the end of the day, I felt like one of those nodding dog ornaments you used to see in the rear windows of cars. Still, ’twas a lovely long meandering walk!
04 Sunday Mar 2018
Tags
birding, birdwatching, British birds, Buzzard, chaffinch, Cosmeston, Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, Great tit, Lesser redpolls, Malard, nuthatch, Redpoll, Redwing, Reed bunting, treecreeper, Tufted duck
2 February A stride was required so I passed through Cosmeston as part of a longer walk. I did, as always, keep an eye out for unusual birds, though the only bird that fitted that category was a Buzzard in a tree by the dipping pond, exactly where a friend had reported it the previous day.
I scattered some seed around for my small and hungry feathered friends, and I did linger a while by the lake to take some photos of gulls. (I’m attempting to learn to recognise gulls of different ages but I’ll post separately about that when I’ve got more photos and information.)
4 February There are various routes I can take when I walk to Cosmeston; on this day I approached from the north, which produced a couple of Bullfinches near Old Cogan Farm and, further down Mile Road, a couple of Redwing feasting on ivy berries.
To escape the Sunday crowds, I headed off piste and almost immediately spotted a Green woodpecker and, seeing it fly to the ground, started stalking it. It flew off but then a mixed flock of tits and finches flew in, amongst which, to my very great delight, were 3 Lesser redpolls, a bird I’ve only seen once before and which is not often seen in these parts. They were feeding in an alder tree, moving often, doing acrobatics while suspended from cones, flitting from branch to branch, all of which made them difficult to photograph. But what a delightful 30 minutes I spent watching their antics.
9 February I was hoping to spot the Redpolls again today but lucked out, though I did spot a flock of perhaps 8 Redwings in the trees nearby. A handsome male Reed bunting was enjoying the seed a kind passerby had left on a fence post by the west lake, and it wasn’t just me who was finding the winds strong and gusty – this Tufted duck was having a bad hair day.
21 February This was school half-term holiday week in Wales, not a particularly pleasant time to visit a country park to enjoy the delights of nature as the parks are usually full of screaming children and frazzled parents at such times. I managed to avoid most of that by taking the paths less travelled but still found much of the wildlife was being scared away by the noise.
Still, I thought I’d make a list of what I did see: Great tit, Blackbird, Dunnock, Robin, Magpie, Goldfinch, Redwing, Carrion crow, Jay, Wren, Blue tit, Buzzard, Jackdaw, Long-tailed tit, Woodpigeon, Mistle thrush, Chaffinch, House sparrow, Starling, Green woodpecker, Reed bunting, Nuthatch, Coal tit, Coot, Cormorant, Mute swan, Black-headed gull, Lesser black-backed gull, Herring gull, Mallard, Tufted duck, Great crested grebe, Canada goose, Greylag goose and Pochard – not a bad list, with 35 bird species, and just one mammal, the ubiquitous Grey squirrel.
28 February South Wales was feeling the brunt of the ‘Beast from the East’, a freezing weather bomb from Siberia, when I paid my last February visit to Cosmeston so it was a short visit, partly for the exercise and I also bought a couple of bags of seed from the Rangers’ Office to feed the birds. You know they’re finding foraging tough when you see a Treecreeper come to the bird feeder – most unusual! And it was also unusual to have the sparse remnants of the previous day’s snow on the ground, so I had to get a few photos of birds (Chaffinch and Mallard) in snow as well. Let’s hope spring (re)appears soon.
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