Winter birds

It's been a great Christmas but very snowy, so it's difficult to see many bones because there is the ground is all covered in lots of snow. Even though its been snowy and cold I've been on lots of walks and seen lots of wildlife, especially birds, so this week I'm just going to write about birds.

Because its been so snowy, the easiest wood to walk in is the Pheasant Wood, on the other side of the river to my village. There are actually lots of pheasant woods around where I live. During the year the gamekeepers look after the pheasants, then in winter people pay to shoot them. Here's a male pheasant on the left with a female pheasant on the right. They have very long tails. I have a pheasant skull in my collection.



Pheasants are quite fat, an they don't like to fly very much, so they just walk around on the ground. Here are what their footprints look like in the snow.





Here is a bird that my Dad saw in the Pheasant Woods when he was out walking. It was beautiful and bright and we had to look up what it was because we didn't know. It was a red legged partridge. From the side, I think it looks like a bit like a tiny penguin.



I didn't see any grey partridges alive, but we found these wings from a grey partridge on one of the tracks.



There are four lakes in the Pheasant Woods. The big lake is almost iced over, so all the mallard ducks are together on a tiny bit where there is still some water. The ducks must get scared because normally they sleep on the lake where the foxes can't get them but now the foxes can just walk across the ice.



We see lots of buzzards on our walks, but they are usually too far away to take a picture of. This buzzard had just killed a rabbit, and when it saw my dad it flew away. I've found two buzzard skulls, both from these woods.



On Boxing Day Dad and I went on a walk to watch some deer. We hid ourselves at the edge of a wood, and a little robin kept coming around us, looking for food at the bottom of trees. I think robins are beautiful. We get robins in the garden too.



There are four more birds that I've seen in my garden. Here's a starling on my bird table.



These two birds were on my garden fence during the snow. They are a baby blackbird and a male chaffinch.



Here's a female chaffinch, which is a different colour to the male.



But the best bird I saw over the holidays has been a pied wagtail. That one was flying round inside a big Tesco store in Edinburgh !

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