Tasty

This morning I took part in the RSPB's Bird Garden Birdwatch - or perhaps Squirrelwatch would be more appropriate, because the grey squirrel was the best-represented species in the garden during the hour I was watching with my binoculars from the kitchen window. I don't mind squirrels, but sometimes I think they're taking the mickey: at one point today three of our seven bird feeders were occupied by squirrels, and two more were hoovering ground food from the top of the patio wall. When a sixth, very fat, individual strolled up the garden and began looking around for somewhere to have breakfast, I called a halt by going out and shooing them all away. The birds went too, of course, but they came back to the feeders before the squirrels decided to risk it, so they were able to feed undisturbed for a while.

Today's count was fifteen species that are very typical for this garden:

Blackbird
Blue tit
Chaffinch
Collared dove
Dunnock
Feral pigeon
Goldfinch
Great tit
House sparrow
Jackdaw
Long-tailed tit
Magpie
Robin
Starling
Woodpigeon.

I also saw a couple of groups of mallards fly over the garden during my hour, and the Merlin app picked up the nearby calls of a blackcap, a rook and a song thrush - but I didn't actually see any of these birds in the garden, so I didn't include them in the list I submitted to the RSPB this evening.

Another bird that would have been very typical for our garden, but which didn't turn up during the count, is the great spotted woodpecker. I photographed this female later in the day at Hillers, displaying just part of the very long tongue she uses for winkling insects and their larvae out of crevices in wood.

Numerous web sites will tell you that the great spotted woodpecker's tongue can extend up to 4cm beyond the end of its bill, and most of them state with no further explanation that at rest it's retracted up and over the bird's skull. If you're anything like me this will drive you wild with irritation, because it's almost impossible to visualise how it might work if you haven't already studied bird anatomy and physiology. Luckily, if you dig a little you can find some sites that at least try to describe and illustrate the workings of a woodpecker's tongue: this is a basic explanation, using the American species the northern flicker as an example; and this is a more detailed description by the illustrator Lizzie Harper for a book about British woodpeckers.

A further woodpecker fun fact that's stated on both these web pages is that the way the woodpecker's tongue wraps around its skull gives it some protection against the deceleration force it experiences when drumming against or drilling into a tree. The tongue and hyoid appear to act as both seat belt and shock absorber, and coupled with the fact that some of the woodpecker's skull plates are made of spongier bone than in other birds, this protects it from brain injury.