Never mind the psyc...I’ll cure you for free. No but really— that damage. It sounds so serious. I had no idea that you were hit so hard. Good thing that you didn’t escape to Cancun...why, you would have missed all this fun. When are the powers that be projecting a return to your domain? It is all just terrible. Here’s wishing you strength...that and a coupla stiff ones to knock back, right. Hang in there, Jane. Hope you are ok, other than the house damage.
Thank you for your concern, but we are fine. We have great contractors that are putting things right, and we should be back to normal by next week. It never occurred to us to go to Cancun (unlike a certain Texas senator) because we care about our cats and hens, unlike a senator who abandoned his constituents.
Having work done in a kitchen is a pain. Ours is very compact, with no spare space for anything. It was a bit of a nightmare when nearly four years ago we had the combi boiler changed, we went from this. To this. My wife thought she might get (another) new kitchen. But I like a challenge. I fixed it myself. I found a kitchen cabinet supplier who could make me a matching door and supply a length of pelmet. Very fortunate as the kitchen was replaced nearly ten years previously and the original fitting company had long gone bust. She got a new fridge/freezer too, as the old one packed up at the same time. That took a bit of "fettling" as it was taller then the old one and I had to remove the top cupboard and make a facia out of the door to fill the gap above it. But the handle came in handy as I put it on the new door. Also created a space for instruction book for all the kitchen appliances, which are now never hard to find if we need them. I made a new free standing "L" shaped tiled fillet to hide the pipework and a bit of bottom pelmet that's secured by half moon bolts, so it could be removed, as on Thursday when the boiler was serviced. There's a flap on the front of the boiler that has to be folded down to access the interior. It amused me when my friend asked me why I hadn't hung the door on the other side. I explained that it was impossible to hang a door on a "fillet" It's just a bit of window dressing to fill the space.The doors are quite heavy, as they are made of MDF with a plastic skin. The door opening as it did was in the way of him getting at the boiler, so he said it had to come off and he started looking in his tool box for a screwdriver. I just leaned past him and took the door off in a couple of seconds without needing any tools. Most kitchen unit doors have Blum hinges, which I fitted to this one. There's a snap on catch at the back of the hinge, you just pull on and the door is released. It goes back in exactly the same way. I was surprised he didn't know that.
I've been watching a few YouTube videos that are live about blue tits and great tits nesting. One of the blue tits was trying to feed a chick a whole peanut and one did take it. After a few hours i went back and one of the chicks had died, I know that it happens but i wander if it was the chick who had the nut because the nut was really too big for it.
I know about these sorts of accidents and when I know that our tits are brooding, I do not put out large seeds like peanuts or even sunflower seeds. I am afraid that the parents have such an uncontrollable need to feed that they may not realise the danger. It is possible that the dead chick there died from a whole peanut, but it could have been something else as well. Please don’t feel bad.
Good job Riley. It is always harder to repair/replace things in an existing house than starting from a blank slate
Thank you @Sjoerd what sort of seeds do you put out this time of year until the fall or autumn? I don't put out peanuts at all because they like the sunflower seeds more but with the husk off, what they call sunflower hearts. But I'm wandering now if i should put them out. I used to get the live mealworms but difficult to look after and I know that there's the dried.
I just put out what is called “small bird spread”, and it has a pic of tits on it. It is all small, round seeds with some wheat or barley mixed in. I give them a dab of peanut butter too. Not surprisingly, they do not touch the seeds when the larvae are available. We get robins, dunnocks, wrens, chiff-chaff’s, wrens, blackbirds, great and blue tits. There are others, but these are the main ones. As marauders we have jackdaws, ravens magpies and wood pigeons. When I feed I do not leave the food out when I am not in the garden, except what is in the feeding house which has the sides closed off with fine-meshed wire with tiny entrance holes in the corners. I have to take measures because otherwise the big birds would decimate the feeding table and spill the unwanted seeds onto the ground, attracting mice and rats. Its always a fine line, the feeding. I want to feed the birds, but I don’t want to attract pests. And as far as using big seeds when I know the small birds are brooding, well it is just a precaution, I don’t really know if it is necessary...I just don’t want to take chances.
Thank you @Sjoerd I'll have to look into it. I do put seed on the ground for the ground feeding birds but not at the moment because have the hedgehog come round and i don't want him to have a lot of seed, but it's alright for him to have some.
They do cause a few problems. This morning I was clearing up his food station after 'arry's visit last night and I noticed he'd been to the toilet in his empty food bowl. "I had words with him." His excuse was, "I didn't notice......it was dark." I was a bit concerned about my trail camera as there was nothing on it at all the night before last, the first time this has happened. As it is set to work from 7.00pm to 8.00am, there were always photos and videos of birds from about 5.00am even when it wasn't picking up 'arry. But last night it only picked up 'arry at 10.30pm and 4.00am. Neither birds nor the squirrel were photographed or videoed. (We thought it was a "Cyril" but noticed after a few weeks it was actually, a "Sybil." But yesterday we saw Sybil...... and Cyril at the feeder together). When I went out to retrieve the card around 9.30 am this morning, there weren't any birds about at the bottom of the garden either. So there's nothing wrong with the camera.
