What's buzzing or flying near you 2024 ?

Pleased to see our first Swallow of the year and my partner heard a Willow Warbler calling.

 

Chiff chaffs still singing in the garden. First orange tip butterfly this morning. No swallows yet but then last year we saw very few which is unusual.

 

Green woodpeckers yaffling … heard several times from our bedroom window this morning and later in the morning in the woodland around the Sainsbury Centre at the UEA (just a mile and a half from our home).

 

I saw a woodpecker on one of my feeders this morning, enjoying the sunflower seeds.
It was a lesser spotted... but I spotted it!

 

Well I had a Robin this morning - in my hand! We were watching this Robin jumping around in the Skimmia below our window and I thought oh no that will be a dead Robin to deal with as I (wrongly) thought it was ill... It's one of those days, sisters birthday call to make, card arriving with woe of an aunt passing on mothers day (she was 93) and now this Robin still jumping about. The donkey ears grew on my head, thinking this looks too active, is it stuck? Poor thing was caught in a length of coconut matting (it had likely pinched from my baskets) tied around one of its legs... Bit of a "B" to get off, especially with my eyes, but it was very well behaved and very still once it realised I was trying to help it. All ended well and it flew off! I think it's a day to stay at home...

 

Well done @DiggersJo for rescuing the little robin.
Sorry about your aunt.

 

Lovely big bumble bee enjoying the daffodils

 

The first Brimstone butterfly of spring visited my garden this morning

 

We had a small blue (at least we think it was, it was a small bright blue butterfly) butterfly flutter past on a dog walk this morning before we stumbled on a swarm of Mining bees which were emerging. It was nice to sit in the middle as hundreds buzzed around. It wasn't as impressive as a couple of years ago when we had a frenzied sex driven swarm of thousands descend on a local hillside. That was one of the most impressive wildlife sites that I've witnessed, or was literally in the middle of.

The buzzards round here are generally mobbed by the crows and you can identify a few from where they have missing feathers. It's quite common to see them deftly flying through the woods and they are often seen worming in bad weather.

 

Must’ve been a sparrow hawk in the garden either last evening or early this morning … when i went outside today there was the corpse of a woodpigeon, breast plucked and eaten on the ground at tge end of the garden.

 

Lots of native ladybirds amongst the dead twigs and dry stalks of perennials that didn’t get sorted out when ‘life’ got in the way. Also quite a few hanging around the pots if fern on the terrace near the roses.

 

Bee fly this afternoon on a verbascum.

 

Greenfinch coming to the feeders more now, brief visits and very wary unlike the Siskins.

 

We have 4 acres of ex farmland which includes a paddock, former donkey pasture - now our veg plot - and lots of trees and mixed hedgerow. It is heaving with birds passing thru, living/feeding/nesting and all the rest.

Our feeding stations get the usual sparrows, tits, chaffinches, wood pigeons, collared doves, magpies and an occasional robin but I hear many more I can't identify so I've downloaded the Merlin identification software onto my phone.

First problem is it hears less than I do - this pm for ages it was just chaffinch, sparrow and blackbird while I could also hear a cuckoo, hoopoes, barn swallows, crows, magpies and a passing seagull or 3.

Second problem? I left it outside for 50 minutes to see what it could do - added a linnet and a redstart and then said "+ 19 more" but it won't/can't tell me what they are! I thought it was set up to keep the list so I could check them later and learn to recognise them by sight and sound but apparently not.

 

Shield (stinky) bug. I think these will become one of our biggest garden pests if the summers continue to warm as they have in recent years. Don’t think I’ve seen one as early as this in this country – went as a treat to Mr Robin (who I think has chicks, or is at least feeding her).