Garden Bird Watching - Starting From Scratch

When we moved to our new home in the summer of last year, I had great hopes of being able to attract a wide variety of birds to our new large garden having had only a small back yard in the years before. Things haven't really worked out as planned so far, we've done so much work on the garden over the last year, it has for the most part been looking like a building site.

The work on the garden is far from complete, we've still to build a patio at the top of the garden where the greenhouse once stood and we need to relocate some rose bushes that we've got growing in the lawn so that mowing isn't so much of an obstacle course.

We do have a bird table in the garden, next to the fence, but it doesn't attract very much, except when I put one of those fruity fat blocks out which the Starlings see off in about a day! On the other side of the fence, our neighbour has a variety of bird feeders hung in trees which always attract a variety of common garden birds including large numbers of goldfinch. I'm not jealous, honestly I'm not, but I do want to get into garden bird photography and pointing the lens over next doors fence may not go down too well!

What I'd like to do this autumn and winter is to establish some new bird feeders in our garden and possibly hang some nest boxes in time for spring. I'm basically starting with a clean sheet as the existing table is where it was when we bought the house and with the array of feeders next door, I do think it needs to be re-located or replaced with something more suitable.

My copy of Birds magazine from the RSPB came yesterday and flicking through the pages of the accompanying mail order booklet and various bird related web sites, the array of feeder systems now on the market is mind boggling!

Paul.