Closet 'Twitcher'

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

'Twitcher' - 4. A bird-watcher whose main aim is to collect sightings of rare birds.

Hello my name is Jodie and I'm a bird watcher. I'm not quite a twitcher but I think I'm on the way. I have a bird feeder suction-capped to one of my bedroom windows, a peanut feeder tied to the window below it, two seed/fat balls tied to the other window and several fat twigs stuck in my window boxes for the visiting birds to sit on as they munch away at the offered bountiful harvest.

I have visiting (don't laugh - these are their proper names) blue tits, (nice photo of one of the locals here), coaltits, , and great tits. These three species have been visiting since last year. A few weeks ago a red robin and his lady friend showed up to seranade us and polish off large quantities of fat balls, and two days ago came along my very first male and female chaffinches. I was so excited I called Stu to tell him. He feigned the appropriate level of excitement, nice man that he is.

Other recent visitors are two heavyweight woodpigeons (my poor flattened parsley) and a mouse with the fattest rear end I've ever seen. I startled him at dusk prompting him to drop the sunflower seed he'd been contentedly munching and attempt a speedy escape. Only, his butt was so big he got stuck trying to squeeze between the window and the window box. After a few seconds of vigourous struggle (while I admired the sheen of his coat and marvelled at the size of his butt) he popped through and scurried off along the wall. The vertical wall with no pipes or anything other than big gaps between the bricks to cling to. Spider-mouse, spider-mouse, does what every spider, er, can.

So that's my wildlife tally from the bedroom windows of our first floor flat. Oh, we did have a snail show up. I pondered how long it would have taken him to climb all the way up to to the window boxes before sending him all the way back down again. I'll look out for him next month.