Birds, Flowers and Insects seen from the Back Kitchen Window

What a joy filled morning - up at 6 a.m. and again watched a female pheasant wandering about the back kitchen lawn.

A little later I noticed a fluttering movement coming down from the silver birch tree, it was a butterfly, an attractive speckled wood. It landed by the pond, where it rested in the warmth of the sun for many minutes. The garden was alive with bees, butterflies and many other flying insects everywhere I looked and no doubt anywhere I didn't.

The fennel which is an amazing wild life attracting plant for a garden, is now more than eight feet tall, it has more than a dozen stems and each of these have many forks in them. The whole creates an enormous plant, more than ten feet around and every stem large or small is topped by a flat panicle of yellow flowers. So densely are these panicles packed together that the whole is like an enormous bouquet of flowers. The best and most extraordinary fact about fennel is the very large and varied number of insects it attracts.  A veritable hoard, creeping, buzzing and flying all over and around, forming a cloud over the plant's flower head.

Perhaps the best plant in the garden this morning is the pineapple broom shrub ((Cytisus Battandieri), it is in the midst of a second flowering, bright yellow tightly packed upright racemes. Each flower is full of tiny black insects, the same type that fill the flower heads of the evening primroses.Each bright yellow cluster of flowers is set against a sea of blue/grey foliage surrounding it.

What made this shrub so special this morning was the number and variety of birds in and around it. The first bird I noticed was the tiny goldcrest as it moved restlessly about the branches. While watching it I noticed first one then a second coal tit, further along the branch were five blackcaps male, female and immature.    

Now my attention was really caught and I started to look in earnest to see what else I could spot. On the lawn underneath the pineapple broom shrub is a bird bath and bathing in it was a willow warbler, on the branch above I spotted another, which quickly dropped to join the first in the bird bath. Higher in the shrub I watched a garden warbler, when he flew it was to a nearby cotoneaster.

Seeing these birds this morning made me realise I just need to be more aware while garden watching.

The aforementioned birds were all special, but as well as seeing all of these I also saw blue tits, great tits, robins, a dunnock, a wren, two young blackbirds and on the grass underneath a pigeon and a thrush.

I had seen so much in this area that I wondered what was on the other lawns, checking them out all I saw was one lone magpie, gleaning the lawn for crumbs left by the foxes. Mind you the majority of what I had previously seen was not on the lawn.