Autumn brings with it a dazzling display of brightly-coloured leaves and a bounty of berries. I love watching wildlife tuck in to all this abundance at this time of year. And here in Thixendale, I never need to go far to see it.
Robins and wrens
From the moment I step on to my back porch, I'm treated to visits from robins and wrens. The wrens are old friends of mine. I feed them mealworms every morning and they’ve taken to calling out for their breakfast as soon as they spot me. These tiny birds are one of my favourite garden visitors and hearing their chattering calls as I put on my boots always puts a smile on my face. This pair are so bold I often find one or other of them flitting through the kitchen, after having slipped through an open door.
They usually find their own way out through an open window and seem quite confident navigating their way past saucepans on the drying rack. Several times one has even headed up the stairs for a tour.
Bullfinches feasting
But one beautiful autumn day, when the sun still held a considerable amount of warmth, I opened the door to the porch to discover a hive of activity. On the right, a pair of bullfinches flew out of a pyracantha bush laden with bright red berries. Whilst on the left, insects were buzzing around an ivy that creeps up the side of the house.
Ivy is an important food source for wildlife now, since it flowers from September to November, offering insects nectar and pollen at a time when there is little else. The berries that follow also become food for the birds in late winter. At first it was the bullfinches that caught my attention. Bullfinches are one of the UK’s most colourful birds and at this time of year they like to gorge on pyracantha berries. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to film them and quickly set about building a makeshift hide out of an old piece of hessian which I draped across a shed door on the edge of my driveway.
Before the sun could disappear behind a cloud, I grabbed a camera and pushed the lens through a hole in the hessian so that I could focus on to the pyracantha. As I waited for the bullfinches to return, I watched the robins and wrens flying in to eat the food I’d left out for them. And then, right next to where I was standing, a blue tit flitted round the door frame searching for spiders.
A female blackbird flew in. She landed on top of the pyracantha and paused before plucking berries off one by one and swallowing them down whole. Then I heard a soft gentle, whistling call – the distinctive sound of bullfinches as they communicate with one another. These birds are quite shy and rarely stray far from cover. I kept still and one by one they hopped toward the pyracantha. First a female and then a more brightly coloured male - his soft, pink breast set off by the dark green foliage and the red berries beside him. Unlike the blackbird, which was eating the flesh of the berries, the bullfinches were after the seed kernel inside.
Extracting seeds
I was transfixed by the way they used their powerful, short and stout beaks to bite into individual berries and so I set about filming the process. The bullfinches worked quickly, stripping each berry of its flesh, rotating it with their small stubby tongues whilst biting down several a times a second. After a few seconds all that was left of each red berry was its seed, which the bullfinch now manoeuvred with its tongue towards the back of its beak.
Here, this finch has a special adaption to its lower mandible - a raised, sharp-angled ridge – which it uses to crack open the seeds to reach the seed kernel. They would spit out the husk shells, swallow the kernel. This whole process took a matter of seconds and then straight away they got to work on the next berry.
The way the birds positioned each seed at the back of their bills and then manipulated their upper and lower mandibles like pair of secateurs to crack the seed in two was amazing. The birds worked so fast as they separated the edible from the inedible, I needed to play the action back in slow motion later to really understand it.
Insects on ivy
Mesmerised, I watched for an hour and then the bullfinches flew off towards the garden pond for a drink. I waited for them to move on before emerging from my hide, but as I made my way back to the porch, I was distracted by the insects humming around the ivy. I changed my camera lens into long macro probe lens and trained it on the flowers. Swarming around the ivy were common wasps.
Most people think of wasps as a nuisance and something to be feared, but they are incredibly beautiful up close and important predators, keeping populations of aphids, spiders and caterpillars in check and helping to pollinate some plants.
My macro lens is 18” long, which ensured I was able to keep a safe distance as I used its magnification to examine the insects in mind-blowing detail. Mixed in among the wasps were also several different species of flies: from blue bottles to more colourful hover flies and even ladybirds. I was so absorbed by the swirl of insects at times I got within a few inches of them – in fact some wasps landed on me and crawled into my hair but so long as I stayed still, they didn’t bother me.
I was particularly taken with the ladybirds, slowly and calmly moving around the ivy drinking nectar and eating pollen, completely unfazed by the busy buzzing of the wasps and flies. They barely flinched when a wasp or a fly landed on them or even climbed over them. Like all beetles, ladybirds have a protective shield made up of two hardened forewings which guard their delicate flight wings underneath.
In these cooler conditions the ladybirds weren’t about to fly anywhere. Instead, they wandered from flower to flower. At night ladybirds usually return deeper into the ivy, taking shelter amongst the climbing stems close to the brickwork. Some might even hibernate tucked into these crevices.
I noticed most of the insects weren’t feeding but were instead trying to glean as much heat as possible from the sun by resting on the brickwork of the house. Watching them, I completely lost track of time. It was after lunchtime, and I’d only made it a few metres from my door!
Goldfinches on teasels
After a late lunch I returned to the garden, but this time a charm of goldfinches feeding on the wildflower seed heads stopped me in my tracks. They were pecking at knapweed seed heads with their sharp beaks. It was good to see these flowers, now a drab brown, continuing to offer a lifeline to the wildlife in the garden – not that long ago they had been teeming with butterflies, including my favourite marbled white, a specialist of chalk land areas.
Suddenly all the goldfinches flew up in a dazzling swirl of colour. It’s easy to see how these birds get their name. As they flew, I could hear this family group chatting back and forth to one another. Walking slowly, I carried my cameras to one of the hides in my garden that overlooks my wildflower meadow.
Sure enough, the goldfinches circled round and flew back down, this time landing on the teasels. These teasel heads were so packed with seeds I could see seeds falling out as the finches were feeding. The goldfinches fed in quite different way to the bullfinches. Compared with the heavy-set bullfinches, these finches are more agile and flighty.
Using their feet, they would grasp on to each swaying seed head, regularly relying on their wings to keep balance as the wind blew through the meadow. I watched as they moved quickly from seed head to seed head. It was when they landed on the stiffer stems of the teasels and were able to enjoy a plentiful seed supply that their actions slowed enough for me to be able to really study how they worked.
Goldfinches have delicate, sharp beaks which they were using to probe into the prickly seed heads and tweeze out the seeds.
It was fascinating to watch this specialised feeding technique and to see how the different members of the finch family, the goldfinch and bullfinch, had evolved to access different food sources in the same area.
Whilst I filmed, I could also see a group of fieldfares as they landed on a crab apple tree and more blackbirds, these ones feasting on the hawthorn berries in the hedgerow at the edge of the garden. There were chaffinches bathing in the pond too. I watched as a beautiful male yellowhammer landed in the hedge before flitting in to join the bathing chaffinches.
It won’t be long before the snow returns, giving the wildlife here on my doorstep a new set of challenges to overcome. Until then, I’ve enjoyed watching how the birds and insects in my garden have adapted to take advantage of autumn’s bounty.
