Looking after our Feathered Friends

We've had some very cold weather this week with temperatures falling below zero overnight. When it's as cold as this, it is essential to remember to put plenty of food and water out for the birds. Some of them, such as the wren that lives in our garden, are so small that they don't carry a lot of spare body fat and rely on us for vital sustenance.

Our preparations for winter bird feeding started a few weeks ago. We had two important jobs to do. The first was to give all the bird feeders a thorough clean especially it was some months since they were last used.


In our picture you can see some of us using the Aga in our kitchen to dry off the bird feeders - it's also great for warming our bottoms when we've been out in the cold. Prior to the drying process we had given everything a good scrub with disinfectant.

This year the disinfecting process is particularly important, following the prevalence of a form of canker, spread by bird droppings, that causes birds to die after their thoats swell up. We read about it in the paper and thought it sounded so horrible that we would be especially careful to keep all our bird feeders nice and clean.

We hope all our readers are doing the same.

If you think about what happened in our garden in the summer (yes we did do a blog about it) you might be able to work out what our next job for our local birds was. Can anyone work out what it was?

Lots of love, all at Bears Unlimited xxx