My first day responsibility-free, after a hectic weekend of child-wrangling… and it rained. Because of course it did.
So I went to Hillers, where the hide was not only dank but unpleasantly cold – but at least I got a Siskin, off the feeders. My BTO record for the day tells me that I managed to tolerate the hide for just over an hour, which indicates persistence, if not common sense, but after that I retired to the café, where the lunch rush was just ending, for restorative coffee and chocolate tiffin.
After thawing out a bit, I drove over to the Leamington Rehab Hospital for scans of my hands and wrists, and then – feeling rather skittish by this time – came home and made hot dogs for dinner. On the way back through Stratford I’d made a condiment stop at Waitrose, looking for German mustard (because as any fule kno, the mustard rule is chicken: French; beef: English; pork: German), but their standards are slipping and they didn’t have any German mustard, so I bought garlic and mustard mayonnaise and red onion marmalade instead. I can’t remember the last time I ate a hot dog – at a barbecue, probably, and I don’t think I’ve been to one of those since Covid – but these were sensational.
Chocolate tiffin and hot dogs…. maybe I’d better avoid the scales for a couple of days.
Anyway… the Siskin. This is one of those rare success stories, with numbers steadily rising, and according to some sources it’s now one of the UK’s commonest garden birds – though I’ve never seen one in ours. It’s a woodland specialist, though that wouldn’t preclude it from turning up in the mature, wooded gardens in our village, and it mainly eat seeds. It mostly breeds in coniferous forests in Scotland and Wales, but in winter the population (swollen by migrants from Europe) tends to disperse around the country in search of food. The strong yellow-green and black markings of this individual, and particularly the black crown and bib, show that he’s a male. Females are much paler and streakier, but rather elegant, to my eye at least. I haven’t managed a decent photo of one yet this season, but I did get a couple of quite nice shots back in 2024. There are more Siskin facts here and here.
R: L2, C5, D13.
