June 30 is Day 99 in this series. There has been a gap in my postings, the one before was for Day 83. There are a few new things for this post but one of the things I have spent a bit of time doing is watching and taking photos of Wood Pigeons, Jackdaws, Crows and Black birds eating the cherries. It will probably be a few days before I do another post for the series.
The header image is of a bunch of cherries that are starting to look tasty. They continued to darken and look softer. That was when we started to get many more birds in the tree. The cherries didn’t last long then.
At one time I counted 6 Jackdaw in the tree helping themselves to Cherries, I would not have been surprised if more were in the tree. Often when something spooked the birds more would fly out than I had seen. The Jackdaws tended to pick off a cherry and then hold it under foot on the branch and peck at it, eating a bit at a time.
We also got Crows in the tree eating cherries. I never actually saw how they ate them. They either flew away or hid themselves so I couldn’t see them.
The real performers though were the adult and juvenile Wood Pigeon. They were greedy. The photos above are of adult Wood Pigeon taking cherries down whole. You can see the bulge in the neck as it goes down into the crop. It took a bit of neck stretching sometimes to get the stalk down.
It was quite amazing to watch the juvenile Wood Pigeon eat the cherries. They are probably a lot lighter than the adults but have their feathers fluffed up more so that they look about the same size as adults. Once they had got a cherry in their beaks the gape would open up behind the cherry and down it would go. Their crop soon became large as they kept forcing more down their throats.
And of course they occasionally got two cherries at a time. Watching the juvenile cope with that was amusing.
I assume it managed to shake it off eventually, or perhaps get hold of it properly to swallow that one too. If nothing else the one in its crop would come off the stalk once it had been in there a while and it would be able to let it go.
The this female Blackbird pecked at a cherry and ate some of it before making an attempt to swallow too much. It didn’t fit. What I did see a female Blackbird drop cherries. I don’t know if it was the same bird but a little later one of them was pecking at the cherries on the ground and collecting juicy bits of cherry in its beak before flying off, probably to feed chicks one or two gardens further up.
New things not posted before in this series are:-
- Back garden
- Hydrangea flowers that started of cream and then progressed to blue.
- Ribwort Plantain in the grass.
- Rambling Rose growing through the Hawthorn and Viburnum and tangling in with the Clematis and Honeysuckle in the back garden.
- Runner Beans flowering in the vegetable plot.
- Ground Beetle
- Front garden
- Red Pelargonium that was supposed to be pale pink
- Calibrachoa that has flowers of different colours on the same plant
- Perle d’Azur Clematis that is just opening up.
This section is all things that have been seen before but as they have still been growing I thought it worth showing new photos of them taken over the last day or so.
The next day in our garden post – Day 99 in our garden.
This is the index to the Days in our garden series.
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