Bird Watching at Warneton

It's amazing what flies into your garden! Living in Bristol, we saw one Blackbird, one Blue Tit and one million Seagulls in five years!

Down here in lovely Devon, we have about 1/2 an acre of garden and are pretty much surrounded by countryside. We also look out over an estuary so have plenty of martitime birds to see as well. However, we are still only 1/2 a mile as the crow flies (ha, ha!) from the centre of the bustling market town of Bideford.

With no previous twitching experience I decided to try and attract some birdies to our garden. We now have about 6 feeders hanging from the trees containing a mixture of small seeds, peanuts and fat balls. As a complete novice I'd really appreciate any advice on how to attract more birds and look after the ones that already come here.

I'm really chuffed with the results and here is a list of birds that have visted our garden:


Blue Tit
Great Tit
Long Tailed Tit
Coal Tit
Wren
Blackbird
Collared Dove
Wood Pigeon
House Sparrow
Tree Sparrow
Gold Finch
Green Finch
Bull Finch
Chaffinch
Gold Crest
Greater Spotted Woodpecker (my favourite!)
Pheasant
Starling
Jackdaw
Song Thrush
Magpie
Crow
Robin
Siskin (18/03/06)

Here is a list of birds that we have seen overhead or within 1 mile of the house:

Egret
Buzzard
Kinfisher (flying straight up the river in the centre of Bideford!)
Sparrowhawk
Goose
Duck
Swan
Curlew
1 million seagulls
Oystercatcher
Turnstone
Cormorant
Diver (not sure which ones)