Seriously folks, its great to see you are all keeping us poor bird food sales people in jobs!
Our biggest seller at the moment is sunflower hearts (no messy husks on the ground) - peanuts have gone down in sales as the price has gone up. Black sunflowers are the best value. Don't the goldfinches fight over the niger?
lofty. That's a very impressive list, esp tree sparrow. I too get gold finches, bull finches & the occasional sparrow hawk. As a bonus, I got a peregrine last week chasing a wood pigeon over my garden.
Lankeela. I also feed only with sun flower hearts...a bit more expensive than the black ones, but no mess.
i used to get about 100 starlings in my garden at a time then a sparrow hawk used my fence as a perch for about an hour and havent had a bird in the garden since so i've stopped putting food out
I often think we have all the tree sparrows in Norfolk, Carrust, in our garden. I planted some natural british honeysuckle in the hedge line about 10 years ago and it's completely taken over. It's a haven for tree sparrows - and the noisiest hedge ever!!
I forgot to add the sparrowhawk in my list - I suppose he benefits from the bird table just as much, but in a different way! (He's welcome though)
Tree sparrows are a recordable species in my area (S Yorks) One of the rarest species in my garden are starlings, would you believe, & we've also got an invasion of waxwings in the city centre.
Starlings are generally on the decline. I can't honestly say I hate them. They demolish the fat balls at a fast rate and are such funny, amusing little birds.
I'll send some tree sparrows up to you Carrust.
I forgot to put the abundant chaffinches on my list!!!