Wild Birds in the Lot et Garonne Area

This is not really a picture of birdlife in the Lot et Garonne and Dordogne area, just a look at what we are see in our garden .

We live near Villereal in Lot et Garonne and since moving here have developed an interest in bird-watching. This winter I have hung up two bird feeders on the tree just outside our French windows and the tree has been permanently 'decorated' with a small flock of great tits and a small flock of gold finches. We also have regular visits by a couple of blue tits which amazingly are quite rare in this part of France. Other regular visitors are chaffinches, sparrows, green finches, robins, wrens and this week we have a haw finch, another fairly rare bird for the area.

I filled one bird feeder with black sunflower seeds which are hugely popular with all the birds. The other I have just obtained and fill with mixed seeds. Most of these seem to end on the floor and I cannot decide whether to buy these again. On the one hand they are obviously less popular and I am worried about encouraging our already enormous population of mice with the seeds all over the floor but on the other hand we often have a flock of partridges which wander around the garden and have now obviously discovered the abandoned seeds. This flock has reached 14. I hope our neighbour, the head of the local chasse (local hunters) hasn't seen them. In fact a female pheasant has just moved in and appears to have set up residence in a blackthorn bush just outside the window. Hope he hasn't spotted her either! 

 

Further away down in the field we get daily visits from a heron and occasionally a little  egret. Jays and green woodpeckers (with an occasional visit from a great spotted woodpecker) are often seen.

 

This area always has lots of buzzards to be seen, often perched on telephone wires. We have a couple of buzzards and a kestrel who are usually circling our land. Luckily I think they are generally on the lookout for the mice and voles, of which there are hundreds in the fields, and not our population of small birds.

In summer we have visits from the beautiful and exotic looking hoopoe and the rarer golden oriole.

Apparently we have a barn owl who is regularly outside shrieking in the early hours but I must admit I'm always in bed and so never hear it.