Paul's Back Garden Safari

We seem to have a very territorial robin in the garden, and he, or she, has laid claim to the area around the feeders at the bottom of the garden. Whenever any smaller bid approaches the feeders it is chased away. However, there does seem to be a hierarchy, and the robin only chases away blue tits, great tits or coal tits. This morning it sat and watched as a nuthatche was feeding. When the male house sparrow visited for breakfast, the robin again sat and watched, but it was very wary, keeping a close eye on the sparrow. The robin can just be seen watching in the photo below.

Last Saturday I was sent outside with yards of lights, wires and plugs with the instruction to light up the front of the house and the shrubs in the garden. Luckily it wasn't too cold and I didn't loose any finger to frost bite this year for a change! As I was fighting manfully with the topiary bush by the front door I found a late season Dicranopalpus ramosus on the wall. It had a few legs missing, well in fact most of the legs are no longer there. This lack of limbs does not seem to have affected its survival this late into the season though. Like spiders there should be 4 pairs, but this is where the similarity between harvestmen and spiders stop. In harvestmen the second pair of legs are longer than the others and act as sensory limbs. Harvestman belong to the order Opiliones, one of 11 orders placed in the class Arachnida. True spiders belong to the order Araneae. Harvestman differ from spiders by having only one pair of eyes on a centrally positioned ocularium, they d...

The winter is coming and the garden is now almost bare of herbaceous plants, with only a few tough stems still poking out of the borders. We've had a number of frosts over the past few weeks which has brought insect hunting to a standstill, but there are a few winter gnats around. So the choice of hunting will be narrowed considerably over the next few months. Had an invasion of Jackdaws into the garden this morning. Almost like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "Birds". I had noticed that the small feeder in the garden was emptying faster than normal, and I now think this might be the reason. The footholds on this feeder are larger than the other one, and allows larger birds to cling on and feed. It's not uncommon for me to see a pair of Jackdaws in the garden, and there are a few pairs in the neighbourhood, but this is the first time I've seen so many in the garden at once. The photos show the queue building up for the feeder. The collective noun for a ...