A Garden Surprise - or Two!! - on 4th October, 2012

Whilst not rare in our garden, Long-tailed Tits are far from common. You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when I was sweeping up under the bird feeders and heard an approaching small flock of L-tTs which totally ignored me and started feeding less than 3ft (1 metre) from my face! It's not as if I was keeping still, or wearing camo - quite the opposite, in fact. Totally spellbound, I watched them for a while before deciding to go indoors and get my camera. By the time I returned, they'd pretty much finished at my feeders, and I only had a few seconds with my camera with them, so the original encounter was more intimate than the images that were obtained!

Long-tailed Tit - our garden

When they left our feeders, they headed up into our Rowan tree, continuing to twitter away as L-tTs do. Suddenly one of the twitters was elongated to about 3 seconds! I'd never heard a sound like this before, and it caused me to investigate. I never found out what exactly had happened, but my eyes fell on a Goldcrest! Now Goldcrest really are rare in our garden, this being only the third ever sighting, the last one being seen about five years ago. Unfortunately this bird was flitting about so much that I just could not get a bead on it with my camera. The only image that I got vaguely in focus was mostly obscured by leaves and could be one of a number of small birds! As this one was almost certainly "just passing through", I don't hold out any hope of getting a second chance at a garden image. 

P.S - I took a second look at my previous post and decided that the images were too dull, so I've tweaked them - I think that they now look somewhat better!