The beginning of January is a good time to start thinking about the birds that may visit your garden. Many will be looking for a suitable nest site. Once spring arrives the birds have usually already paired up and the task of raising a family begins, by providing nest boxes you can make this task that little bit easier.
Many birds are finding it very difficult to find suitable hedgerows and trees to nest in, where I live the area has undergone massive regeneration and a lot of habitat has disappeared, one reason why we have to help out, it is not ideal but a nest box is better than nothing.
If you already have nesting boxes up then they need to be checked and cleaned before birds start arriving, late autumn or early January is a good time to do this. I shall assume that you have no nest boxes in place; the one pictured here is a typical nest box that you can buy already made from garden centres. This is the easiest way to get started, however it is more satisfying knowing you built a little house for your birds, then watching them as they grow up, fledge and fly off.
The plans below are for a typical nest box and can be adjusted to suit various types of birds, the only thing that needs to be change is the size of the entrance hole.
The Sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is an extremely popular and useful plant, we get Sunflower Oil from the seeds, useful fats include Monounsaturated, Saturated, and Polyunsaturated. They can be eaten by humans and provide us with vitamins like vitamin E, B1 and B6, as well as other nutrients. Wild birds get the same benefits because they are packed full of oils which in turn gives the birds energy and heat.
If you really want to help out the bird that visit your garden, then this is an essential item, I would recommend getting Sunflower Hearts, mainly because there is no husk that the birds have to remove first before they can eat them.
By using sunflower hearts you will cater for a greater variety of birds, some birds struggle trying to open normal sunflower seeds because they have a soft beak, if you buy hearts with the husk already removed then less energy will used up trying to eat them. Another benefit is that there will be less of the unsightly husk wastage.
In my garden the Greenfinches stay longer if Sunflower Hearts are available, usually a few squabbles in who eats first.
Wild Bird Seed Feeders come in all shapes and sizes, the one pictured here is a Double Seed Feeder, meaning it has pplaces to cater for upto 4 birds. Generally it takes the most common seed mixes as well as sunflower hearts and seeds, most types of small wild birds can use this type of feeder, Great Tit, Blue Tit, Goldfinch, Greenfinch in fact most finches, and Sparrows, to name a few.
This feeder is not recommended for Niger Seeds because they are too small light, better to use a specialised feeder for them.
Once the birds start using the feeder you may find it gets a bit dirty, I clean my mine about once a month or sooner if the seeds are all used up. You should clean inside and out with a solution of bleach and water (diluted), washing up liquid, disinfectant, main thing is to give it a good scrub and then thoroughly rinse the feeder, wait for it to dry and fill back up with seeds.
If you want healthy birds then this is an essential bit of good practise, bacteria and disease is easily spread when allowed to thrive, you may have read or heard about bird flu, don't let your birds get it or be the cause.
A bird feeder like this one can be hung from a bird feeder station, or a hanging basket bracket on a wall, or a from branch of a tree. It is best hung at least 3 to 4 feet from the ground, cats could be a problem otherwise, your other pest might be a squirrel which can chew your feeder and ruin it. If you do have squirrels then you may prefer to buy a squirrel proof type of feeder.
Spring is one of the four temperate seasons, the transition period between winter and summer. Spring and "springtime" refer to the season, and broadly to ideas of rebirth, renewal and regrowth. The specific definition of the exact timing of "spring" varies according to local climate, cultures and customs. At the spring equinox, days are close to 12 hours long with day length increasing as the season progresses. (Wikipedia)
A favourite time of the year for me and probably lots of other people, I get excited but also bewildered with everything that is going on, I get stressed because I have so many choices, that its hard to pick one thing to go to see and photograph.
I often wonder why we have Seasons, and it's not usually something you know unless you’re told or you read about it.
Well here's my quick and easy way of describing why we have Seasons.
You will already know that the Earth rotates, and that the Earth rotates round the sun. This would not normally cause what we call the Seasons, the magic is the fact that the Earth is tilted, it is tilted by about 23.5 degrees. Basically all this means is we get varying degrees of sunlight, more sunlight because the Earth is closer to the Sun means we call it summer, and less sunlight because the Earth is tilted further away from the Sun then its Winter, and in between is either Spring or Autumn. For better explanations then visit Wilipedia has a more complete information regarding the Seasons than you will find here.
If you live elsewhere in the world then your seasons may be different, the ones below apply to the United Kingdom.
When working with images a lot you may find that their are times when opening Photoshop is too much effort, or it does not support a particular function you need. I have a few Image Utilties that I use and find them really useful, they are free to download, some are old software programs that still have a lot of life in them.
The Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a standard, created by Adobe Systems Inc., for processing and storing standardized and proprietary information relating to the contents of a file.
XMP standardizes the definition, creation, and processing of extensible metadata. Serialized XMP can be embedded into a significant number of popular file formats without breaking their readability by applications that aren't aware of XMP. Embedding metadata avoids many problems that occur when metadata is stored separately. XMP is used in PDF, photography, and photo editing applications.
XMP can be used in several file formats such as PDF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, GIF, PNG, HTML, TIFF, Adobe Illustrator, PSD, MP3, MP4, Audio Video Interleave, WAV, RF64, Audio Interchange File Format, PostScript, Encapsulated PostScript, and proposed for DjVu. In a typical edited JPEG file, XMP information is typically included alongside Exif and IPTC Information Interchange Model data. (go to Wikipedia for more)
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