Unusual visitors

In the back garden, hanging from an apple tree, are 5 bird feeders. We get plenty of birds and along with the common garden birds, there are a few rarer, or less common birds that I don't normally see in the back garden.

This is one of my first pictures of a siskin

One of these is the siskin. I started seeing them in the back garden in early 2014, they then disappeared for the summer. They came back next winter and left again for the summer. However, as I have said in August, (see here), the siskins came early.

We still regularly get siskins. We think the siskins came from a pine forest that got cut down for a housing estate.

Another garden bird that has recently come into the garden is the coal tit. The coal tit looks a lot like the great tit but has a white line on the top of it's head. The coal tit is now the third bird in the tit family and, like the siskin, we now have a pair of coal tits who regularly come into the garden.

Some birds visit the garden for half an hour before leaving. I saw two birds that did this two Sundays ago.

One was a black cap. A male black cap came down and fed on the bird feeders during a week day a fortnight ago and we suspect we have seen the female throughout the last month, but it could be a female greenfinch.

The other was a goldcrest. I have seen a goldcrest once before at RSPB Pulborough Brooks, but never before at home. It was a very short visit.

Some other unusual visits to the garden include a sparrowhawk, (I was too young to understand what it was), a few encounters with a greater spotted woodpecker and a fieldfare. The fieldfare, like the sparrowhawk, came when I wasn't into wildlife photography.