During the allotted hour, quite a lot of my usual visitors did not come - magpies, jackdaws (hoards of them) and coal tits. It seems such a pity that these will not show on my results sheet! By the way, has anyone any suggestions for keeping squirrels off my bird feeder? They manage to shin up the metal pole, even though I have greased it. I spent £25 on bird food on Saturday morning and much as I love watching the squirrels quarrelling over the contents of the feeder, I resent spending that much money on them!
We have a squirrel baffle (cone) that goes round the pole, so they can't get up it. It mostly works - ours is a bit old, plastic and skew-wiff (something on the fixing is a bit broken, so it's tilted), so one year they were able to leap across from below it to get onto a long (Droll Yankee Onyx) feeder and that year they also nibbled round the edges! It's working this year though (the pole is far enough away from the shrubbery that they can't jump from there), although I might end up replacing it with a new metal version in future (pretty sure there's one in the RSPB catalogue). I love watching the squirrels but the rate they eat, I can't afford to feed them (plus it seems a bit of a con them being out and about - I'm sure when I was a child I was told they hibernate!). Am also thinking about buying a "Squirrel Buster" bird feeder to try - at the moment the only place I can put out hanging food is on the pole!