Wildlife makes you smile and cry

Our lovely pheasant family have gone from four chicks down to just the one. I guess it’s just what happens, we know we have foxes and other predators, and also buzzards that live in the trees at the back of the field, it’s just such a shame to have lost so many of them. But they still love hanging around the garden – they’re waiting for breakfast when we get up and most days, as long as it isn’t raining, they just stay in the garden until bedtime!

Dad’s aren’t meant to have much to do with rearing the chicks according to Google, but ours certainly does, he’s with them every day.

Anyway as I haven’t posted some of these pics before here’s lots of the chicks and feeding time.

They have places in the garden they like to wait for food, this is just at the top of the bank between the lower and higher garden/field. They don’t even run away now, and they recognise the sound of the bag of seed being shaken and come running 🙂

Mum loves a good dust bath here too, and although we haven’t caught it on camera, she’s teaching their remaining chick how much fun it is… he also loves a good leg and wing stretch – must try to catch that one on camera – it’s very cute!

We’ve also got a family of Red Legged Partridges. We’ve caught them on the motion sensor camera before so we knew they were around, but they’ve also decided our garden is great for raising chicks. They are much smaller than the pheasant chicks, more like fluffy little ducklings, but they don’t seem to mind sharing the feeding area!

Mr Hare has been back to have some fun too… the day these photos were taken he decided it would be fun to run through the middle of the pheasant family while they were eating.

Lots of flapping, squarking and flying off in different directions. 5 mins later two of the babies were crying at one side of the garden… mum was nowhere to be seen, but dad came to the rescue and ushered them back to the feeding area to wait for mum who flew back in from a different direction about 10 mins later!