In March my granddaughter and I thought we’d make a selection box of nesting material for our garden birds. We walked around the garden gathering possible materials including feathers kindly left by wood pigeons and wool caught in the hedge from the sheep next door. Next we brushed our dog and carefully collected all the hair. We then arranged our materials in the selection box that we placed outside the dining room window so that we could sit in comfort and watch for visitors.
Pick your own
Dunnock collection nesting material by Rosemary Winnall
Rosemary offers her birds a selection of nest-building materials...
'Pick Your Own' box of nesting material by Rosemary Winnall
Then lockdown happened and sadly our granddaughter cannot make her weekly visits so I have had to send her photographs instead. The great tits and blue tits have been regular visitors and when some of the content blew out in the wind, the dunnock, caught on remote camera, appreciated the dog hair.
Great tit collecting nesting material by Rosemary Winnall
We found that feathers and dog hair went first. We thought that perhaps a female wren might have visited whilst we weren’t looking and taken some of the feathers to line her nest. The wool was popular with the tits, although they had some difficulty extracting it in the lengths they required. But we had no takers for dried moss, dead grass, old hydrangea flowers or dead leaves; but there are plenty of those elsewhere in the garden to choose from. Perhaps next year we should replace these with small twigs, wet mud and spiders’ webs!