In former times the house sparrow could be found every where you looked: in cities, in suburban areas, in the countryside. Nowadays the house sparrow numbers are declining rapidly and this is happening over much of Western Europe.

Studies show that there are several reasons for this decline. For instance the use of pesticides in gardens but also the disappearance of so-called “wild gardens”.
The trend for low maintenance and smaller gardens with more concrete, gravel, paving and evergreen shrubs see to it that less and less insects are available in the breeding season for the house sparrow.

Our garden is full with shrubs and hedges, it has several birdfeeders and thus the reason why we can still enjoy these cute creatures. There is a whole bunch of them living in our relatively small suburban garden. Here are just two pictures we shot recently. The first picture shows a juvenile house sparrow looking for food on the ground



And in this picture a male house sparrow is eating from an elderberry.



Do you want the house sparrow back in your garden? Well, here are some tips:
- provide for food (a.o. bird seeds) and water in your garden
- plant trees, shrubs and climbers to provide shelter to the house sparrow.
- don’t cut your lawn every week but let the grass grow a little bit.

And there are many more things you can do. Just search for it on the internet.

The last couple of weeks the Great Spotted Woodpecker is a frequent quest at our birdfeeder. Early in the morning and late in the afternoon are his favorite times to eat some peanuts.

This picture shows a male Great Spotted Woodpecker, which can easily be recognised due to the red patch on the back of his head. A juvenile woodpecker has a red patch on its nape (not on the back of its head). The female woodpecker hasn't got a red patch at all. So, it is quite easy to tell who is eating all our peanuts today.

When the Sparrow-Hawk just a couple of days ago caught the house-sparrow in our garden, the juvenile woodpecker was feeding from the birdfeeder, which is only about one meter away from where the sparrow-hawk had landed.
He kept on hanging there stiff as a board, while the sparrow-hawk was plucking its prey on the ground. We could hear the juvenile thinking: "please, don't let her see me, please don't let her see me". The poor creature was hanging in there for at least 10 minutes before he was able to escape to a saver spot.

We were having an early diner (at around 17.00 hrs) when we suddenly saw all the birds in our garden take off. And at the same time we heard a loud scream which seemed to be the scream of a house sparrow. And then......suddenly there she was, in the middle of our small garden, with a house-sparrow caught in her claws: a Sparrow-Hawk.

She looked around for quite some time untill she finally declared the garden as 'safe' and started to pluck her prey. She was only about 8 - 9 metres away from us, but that didn't seem to bother her. Probably the insect-screen made us a bit invisible to her. We were able to shoot a photo of the Sparrow-hawk, but only through the insect screen. But nevertheless it is quite a nice shot.

In the fields near our house a farmer put up a nesting box for kestrels. This year there were two young birds on the nest. This is an image of one of the youngsters waiting for his parents to bring him some prey. The image by the way was shot with a Canon Powershot A640 handheld at the zoomeyepiece of a Zeiss Diascope (85mm). The bird was sitting at a distance of at least 100 yards.


Click to enlarge

Last week we shot a few images of green finches in our garden. This one is enjoying his meal at the bird feeder.