A Pair of Birds

Well...I couldn't put the obvious title could I?

M and I took the difficult decision to remove the hanging bird feeders from our garden. Despite trying for years to find a way of feeding the non-ground feeders successfully we've called time.  The problem is that we have a resident flock of feral pigeons in the town, and all the sunflower seed remnants that the finches drop to the ground are a favourite with the pigeons.  Because of this they literally lived in the garden, tramping down the flower beds and lawn around the feeding area and pooing all over the conservatory and house windows (and when I say a flock, I'm talking about up to 25 pigeons at a time visiting throughout the day!).  We've tried several ways of covering the area with grids which allowed blackbirds and smaller birds to get to the fallen seed but keep the pigeons out.  However this has meant that not all the fallen seed has  been eaten, has got sodden in the rain and keeps going mouldy or cakes dry in the sun.  Cleaning out caked, wet, mouldy, greasy seeds has become unpleasant for us and unhealthy for the birds.  So we decided to stop.  We will probably continue to use a small wire cage with a ground feeder tray of seed in another area of the garden in future but sadly this will no longer  attract the finches now.
So...to cut a long story short, we had an excess of unused bird food in the garden shed, so we took it all along to the Hawk and Owl Trust at Sculthorpe Moor for them to make use of in their feeders.  It was a dull, wet afternoon but we still had a wander around the reserve and managed to get a photo of this pretty blue tit and a coal tit in extras.