Feed your fledglings
How can we help our garden birds raise a brood successfully? Adrian Thomas has some tips
How can we help our garden birds raise a brood successfully?
Birdsong is one of the glorious features of a spring garden, but it’s just the glamorous front-of-house show behind which all manner of frenetic activity is under way. There are nests to be built, eggs to be laid and then increasingly demanding chicks to be fed. The first thing each pair of birds needs to find is a suitable nursery – a nest site. It has to be sheltered from the elements with a stable-enough platform that their cupshaped cradles won’t get destroyed in a storm. Most importantly, it must be somewhere well hidden. From when the eggs are laid to when the baby birds fledge their nursery, the nest needs to have a good chance of remaining undiscovered.
There’s a host of would-be nest predators out there, from squirrels and cats to magpies and rats. Each type of bird has an in-built image of the perfect nest site. Blue tits and great tits need a hole in a tree, for which a manmade box can be a perfect substitute. However, most of our garden birds are looking instead for dense cover, and that’s where many gardens fall short; they just don’t offer enough options. If the only possible choices are one or two spindly bushes or climbers, then predators don’t have to play hide-andseek for long before finding their target.
Building materials
Once the parent birds have found a suitable nest site, they’ll be on the lookout for a ready source of building materials. Their DIY shopping list is quite extensive, again differing slightly according to the species. Twigs, rootlets, moss, dead leaves, dried grasses, animal hair, feathers, mud – all get used by one or other garden bird. These are the kind of materials that a plant-filled garden produces all the time. However, we do have a habit of raking and clearing and tidying things up. That in itself isn’t a problem; a tidy garden can still be wildlife- Two weeks after the eggs are laid, the blind, hungry chicks emerge friendly. The issue is when the tidying concludes with everything being burnt or thrown in the bin. If you like a neat garden, just put all the leaves and twigs and clippings you gather in discreet piles and your birds will be very grateful. Into the completed nest, the female lays her eggs and then incubates them, keeping them at 25C (77F) or higher, by warming them against a special bare patch on her belly. She herself is very vulnerable at this time. If danger approaches, she must decide whether to freeze stock still and hope she isn’t noticed, or flee, thereby revealing the location of her precious clutch. A fortnight later, the chicks hatch, but the threats are far from over for them because they emerge blind, naked and helpless. They’re totally dependent on their parents
for food, shelter and protection. Mum and dad now have a seemingly never-ending quest, dashing backwards and forwards, dawn until dusk, to find enough food to keep their brood satisfied. A nest can seem full of open hungry mouths all pleading ‘feed me, feed me!’
Ready to fledge
It takes yet another fortnight, or even longer for larger birds such as pigeons, before the young have grown feathers and are ready to fledge, venturing out into the big, scary world. Even then, the parents may have another couple of weeks of tending to the youngsters’ demands before the new generation finally goes it alone. You might think the parent birds deserve a rest after all that, but most need to crack
“Mum and dad have a seemingly never-ending quest to find enough food to keep their brood satisfied”
on and do it all over again. Few of this year’s young will make it safely through their first year, so it’s only by having multiple broods that their populations can be maintained. To keep our gardens alive with song, it makes it all the more vital that we do what we can to increase their chances of success.