News items for tag garden - Koos van den Hout

Winter picture time:

Sparrow visiting the birdfeeder

We hung up a bird-feeder in the backyard last weekend and it is now very popular since it got cold the last few days, making for a few nice pictures this morning. They look a lot better at full size.

Sparrow in the backyard

Sparrow in the backyard

This evening I decided to not stay indoors but to work in the garden a bit. The hazel tree (Nederlands: Hazelaar) needed some serious pruning as it grew a lot last spring. Using the saw I removed a number of 3 meter long branches. I had to stop because it became to dark to work but there still is some work left on the hazel tree. One branch was straight and long enough to keep it for my father-in-law. The rest will be sawed into pieces that fit the boxes we store the wood for burning in.

Spring in the garden: the birds are quite busy and eat lots of seeds. My guess is they are more hungry now (time to build their nests) than in winter time. Everything is green and coming alive. Yesterday evening I could sit outside for a while.

Some long-planned garden work today: I pruned the apple tree. Having the tree almost lose branches under the weight of the apples last year and having part of the apples hanging way to high made me decide to seriously prune it before spring really starts. Quite some work. I hope the tree will do better this year. And we have a bigger load of firewood now. I hope this summer will have some evenings to deal with the previous load of firewood.

The apple tree in our back garden is so loaded with apples the branches are bending under the weight. Not breaking (yet). Looks like a lot of apples will be available in a few weeks.

The apple-tree in our garden heavy with apples.

no solar power

Picture I took yesterday morning in the back garden.

We recently hung up some bird food in the back garden (way out of reach of the cats!) and it is funny to see little birds visit in the morning and the afternoon. This morning I took time to set up the camera and await interesting results. The wait (and cold) was worth it:

Bluetit in the garden feeding (looks a lot better in full-size)

Caught the cat who lives across from the back of our house on camera recently: Achterbuurkat 1 foto Achterbuurkat 2.

It is a coming and going of birds in our garden at the moment (resulting in a lot of comments from the cats).

Sparrow in our backyard

Photographing them is hard as they move around a lot.

At home, in the garden, with barbecue weather I notice an ad-hoc network in the wireless networks lists with ssid AMD_IBSS and regularly changing channel and mac address. Anybody got any idea what this is? In other wireless at home news: the neighbourhood has no unsecured wireless networks left, and WEP is a minority.

Some pictures from the feeding of the blackbirds in our garden:

Blackbird with food on our lawnchair, ready to deliver it to the nest

and

Blackbird in the entrance to the nest

all gardenlife now has a set gardenlife.

Two dead young blackbirds in our garden today. I'm not sure what happened, the best guess is that the cats got them in their first flying lesson.

Blackbird with food

I got a picture of the blackbird after a lot of waiting with the camera standby.

The blackbird nest in our backyard is occupied again. Two blackbirds are flying in and out of the place I saw the nest. We were gone for a couple of days, I guess they thought the garden was safe enough. Today we had lunch in the garden and one of the blackbirds was a bit irritated at us sitting in our own garden! ;)

Birds are very active in our back yard. First I saw blackbirds active and thought they might be building a nest. Indeed they were, but when they found out people walk really close to that nest they abandoned it again.

Blackbird nest hidden in our garden

Today I saw sparrows on chimneys all trying to defend their territory.

Sparrow on a nearby chimney

I don't have to travel very far to try nature photography!

Herfst werkzaamheden in de tuin: we hebben bloembollen geplant en de bruidssluier nog eens stevig teruggesnoeid. De pergola zakt steeds schever, dus dat moest ter voorkoming van echte problemen bij een storm. We hebben van van alles wat we willen snoeien (appelboom, hazelaar, andere struiken) opgezocht wanneer dat zou moeten en het komt toch allemaal neer op 'vroeg in het voorjaar'.

It seems the after summer warmth is confusing the pigeons: today we took a picture of a pigeon nest near our house with 2 young birds in it.

New cat pictures: Tender the garden tiger, Tender the garden tiger action shot, Tender the garden tiger sneaking around and Moppie enjoying the morning sun.

Easter monday activity: building and painting a birdhouse. We (Mirjam and I) got a kit for one as a present last September and finally found the time to put it together. Birds won't like it for this spring, but maybe they can get used to it for next year.