The Wilko Wild Bird Project: Feeding The Birds In Our Garden.

I'm pleased to say that this year we've been chosen by Wilko to be Wild Bird Bloggers. We're really lucky in that we have a quite large garden, and although we're in a town, we have countryside very nearby. We have a lot of birds who visit and live in our garden.

Wilko sent me a multi-purpose nesting box, a wooden bird table, a cage seed feeder and a bag of wild bird seed mix. When the boys came home from school they were genuinely excited and had a lot of questions about where we were going to put everything.

The Cage Seed Feeder is great. It was really easy to fill, and the seed doesn't come out by itself unless you swing it around quite violently (no thanks to my youngest for testing that!). We do have squirrels occasionally, so it's good to know that the birds can at least get some of the seed for themselves.

The Wooden Bird Table was really easy to put together using a screwdriver. The wood is very light and soft, which makes it easy to assemble. It makes the lifespan a bit shorter, but as this bird table retails at only £10 you can't ask for more, and the roof is a harder wood. 

We chose a time when we thought maybe we might have some relatively calm weather, and placed the bird table in a prime spot where I regularly throw seed for the birds. It's away from walls so that cats can't jump onto it, and sheltered from the general road noise, people and cars going past. 

The bird feeder we put in a tree at the back edge of the garden where it will also be relatively safe from cats. Our tree didn't have a branch suitable to slide the feeder over, so I fastened the handle to the branch with string.

The weather here has been awful for the last 2 weeks, with the tail end of a storm bringing constant rain and wind, so we have struggled a bit with getting started...there's been a lot of 'lying down on the job'. 

The bird table doesn't fare very well against 60 mph gusts of wind and has now moved closer to the wall, where it hasn't yet fallen over! Yeeay!  Annoyingly this is also near to the window and the birds don't feel safe enough to use it yet, but they have loved eating the seed from all the times it was blown over!

I'll be honest in that because of the blowy weather we haven't seen very many birds venturing out, even our resident owl hasn't been perching above our van and leaving his usual deposits. It makes it all the more important to leave our some food though, because clearly the birds are having a rough time at the moment.

We will move the table back out onto the lawn when the wind rain die down a bit, and the birdbox we'll put on a larger tree in our garden. The boys are ready with their lists of British birds, they've seen lots of birds, but only ticked off 4 so far - we have a lot of Blackbirds, Magpies and Robins...

Wilko have a range of products for Wild Birds, all are very easy to use or install and fairly light if you are carrying them home on the bus. The items we've been sent are available instore and on the Wilko website at the following incredibly reasonable prices:

Wooden Bird Table £10
Multi-Purpose Nesting Box £1.50
Cage Seed Feeder £6
2kg Wild Bird Seed Mix £1.50

Watching the birds is relaxing and calming. Taking time out to focus on something beautiful is a pastime we should probably all adopt daily. It's great knowing that in spite of the locally exciting weather, birds in my garden can still find some food and get back under shelter.

We're really looking forward to fitting our birdbox and keeping an eye on our bird table and feeder all year. Hopefully they'll bring a more birds to our garden, as we love watching the adult birds raise their youngsters.