Garden parrots

Some garden birds surprise us. Hawfinches are so brightly coloured and big that they look as if they belong in the tropics.

They are however very much European birds and they are found across the continent and eastward. There are variations of the hawfinch in America and another in China; but the male European garden bird is the most dashingly coloured and striking of all.

The big beak is powerfully like that of a parrot’s and it can crack its way into beech seeds, hawthorn seeds (hence the name) and even olive stones! Here he is eating sunflower seeds and making easy work of them.

This male emptied this feeder in an hour, scattering some to the grass below but eating the lion’s share itself.

The markings give it a distinctly thuggish appearance and there is no surprise that the blue tits and great tits leave the feeder to the hawfinch when he appears. He is often with his browner mate, but my husband didn’t manage to catch her in his lens.

The hawfinch call is pretty dull for such a spectacular bird. It is a little like part of a robin’s call, but if it hadn’t been for my Merlin recording app, I would never have realised that they had been around all year, quietly calling to each other.

My neighbour has a magnificently over-grown garden, splattered with abandoned children’s bikes and a yew hedge that his neighbour has to cut, to stop it growing over the road. Yew berries are some of the favourite foods of the haw finch and I like to think that our pair of birds have nested happily in the thickness, while my tidy minded neighbour sucks his teeth in disapproval!

I don’t want to replicate the rusty bike garden, but neither do I want the weed killed, stone smothered “garden” of my other neighbour. Like everything in life: it is finding the perfect balance between the mess and the moribund!