Great Tits

We have done the clever trick of getting back to Bér just as the snow started falling. It hasn't stopped since, so we are snowed in again. As I am supposed to be going to Debrecen tomorrow and the Bükk over the weekend, it isn't looking very promising at the moment.

Roy likes to keep busy, so a few weeks ago he fixed 4 of the old wooden bowls up with the chains left over from my lockable orienteering controls in readiness for the time when the pelargonia come out again. The plastic hanging baskets are not particularly pretty, so I agreed to wooden ones in future. So, yesterday morning he came in and said: There are lots of little birds on the bowls looking quite aggrieved at not finding any food. As we have just bought a 20kg bag of bird seed for Nelly on Monday we asked for a little back and since then have dozens of the little twittering things happily stuffing themselves until it's all gone. Why didn't I think of this sooner? It is delightful watching them, especially that they must have passed the word round, resulting in mobs of them clearing out the seed very fast.

By the way, I originally thought they were coal tits, but it turned out they are all great tits. A friend looked it up in his bird book which had all the English names as well as the Hungarian ones. In England blue tits are the commonest tit, but they are very rare here. Watching the birds I did think that they looked a little bit too large to be coal tits and I was right. By the way, the Hungarian name for the lovely birdies we have been feeding translates literally as "coal tit", but they are great tits. Their yellow tummies and the black line down the middle proves it.

Nelly said that it is not fair getting them used to being fed and then when we are away the bowls are empty, so I have also hung up a piece of fat and will buy some seed balls, which are stuck together with fat, so they last.

Enjoy the pictures!