Here's a chubby robin just outside our back door, contemplating whether or not to have some more grain on a frosty winter morning. There are more bird pictures in the gallery.			Birds We are extremely pleased and proud to announce that this year, 2004, we have three nesting pairs of swifts in the eaves of the cottage. These totally superb flying creatures make anything humans do in the air, with all their technology, totally laughable. We have seen these birds perform such staggering feats as to leave you gasping with disbelief. But if you want to keep your flying down to merely spectacular then the outbuildings simply belong to the swallows and the housemartins. Seeing sixty of them on a telegraph wire is not uncommon. They are colony breeders and when you live with a colony you quickly learn how they communicate. Whenever we hear their danger call we go to see what's causing the commotion and help scare it away. It's normally a magpie or a cat, but once it was a sparrowhawk. We startled each other and for a few seconds we just looked at one another, not six feet separating us. Such a beautiful small bird of prey. It then did a back flip and darted out of a broken window, dead swallow in its talons. Magpies are common here and they are clever birds, good at opening things. And the jays are coming ever closer. The more trees and shrubs we plant the more birds we have. We normally have a green woodpecker coming down to the garden in May to feed on new colonies of ants, and the past couple of years we have been lucky enough to have a songthrush entertaining us with birdsong we will never tire of hearing - what a repertoire! The craftiest bird of all is of course the heron, who comes silently and steals the frogspawn from the bottom pond. Oh yes, I've seen you. And then there is the pheasant, the most stupid of birds. We have the full set of finches, dunnocks, most wagtails, sparrows, robins, wrens, blackbirds, thrushes, owls, woodpeckers, crows, wood pigeons, most birds of prey including red kites, most tits, some warblers, starlings and a cuckoo. Should keep you busy with a pair of binoculars anyway.