The snow has finally started melting out here, which is great news for the birds that visit our garden. All through the bad weather we have been visited by blue, long-tailed and great tits, blackbirds, magpies, chaffinches and wood pigeons while our lone robin aggressively keeps any other robins out. While I was making a cup of tea this morning I was delighted to see our favourite visitor had returned now that most of the snow has gone from the lawn.
There’s ants in there somewhere
It was Byron the green woodpecker, who was back probing the lawn for ants.
Beak’s a bit muddy
There must be a thriving community of the little critters living in our lawn, because he was there for some time and came back later for a top up.
Sadly I worked this out once – Green Woodpeckers will apparently consume up to two thousand ants a day. The RSPB estimates that there are thirty thousand green woodpeckers in the United Kingdom so that is about sixty million ants a day or twenty-two billion a year and that is a lot of ants!
Well someone has to eat them and rather them than us