Goldfinches!

Isn't he beautiful? But this is a youngster- the adults have red on their faces, covering the eye. Or to be more precise, the males have a red eye mask that covers the eyes completely, and the females' eye mask stops half way across the eye area. If you look closely at the last photo, you can just about see his dad on the right, towards the back. You can see the splodge of his red eye mark.

But anyway, my point is, this fella is lovely, but he'll get even more colourful as he gets older!

It took us ages to get goldfinches to the garden. They eat a tiny seed called nyger seed. It's so small you need to have special feeders so that it doesn't just spill out everywhere. The first feeder we bought, we ended up throwing away. No one came to it. And then, earwigs inhabited it. Yeauck!

In the spring, I heard the goldfinches' very distinctive call again, so bought a new feeder. I tried it in a few places, before they 'found' it here, in our hawthorn tree.

One day, I was standing at the kitchen window, finally deciding that yes, this window is filthy and could really do with a clean, when a goldfinch flew down and half hovered, half leaned on the window-pane, just up in the corner. I watched, amazed, as it pecked away at a cobweb. He fluttered to and fro doing this, several times. They use the cobweb material for binding together the moss in their nests!

It gave me a good reason to leave the window cleaning for a bit longer, and also made me think of spiders in a SLIGHTLY better light. (I'm still terrified of any bigger than an inch, though, and feed them to my Dyson.)

This wee fella confirms that these lovely birds have been breeding nearby. Horray!

One other thing, just look at all the berries on this tree! It is absolutely smothered in them. My mum says that this is a sign that a bad winter is to follow. I've heard that before. What I want to know is, how does the tree know this?