I have spent the morning photographing visitors to the garden after catching sight of the first male Blackcap of the season. On Saturday we had a female and I have been looking very closely ever since, and also trying to get a good photo.  So far we have had a nice “first winter”  Goldfinch that I suspect is a young female. The photograph is interesting because this bird has not completed it’s post juvenile moult and is yet to acquire the usual red mask seen in adults. The old name for Goldfinches, used by bird enthusiast in an age when it was common practice for working class Englishmen to keep them, usually with canaries, is “greypate”.  This bird is half way between a greypate and an adult. 

Our next picture shows a Blue Tit, one of the more common British garden birds but never the less, a very welcome and attractive one. This little bird is not the smallest of the Tit species, in fact far from it. Both Coal Tit and Long Tail Tit are significantly smaller in body mass than Blue Tits. We have had a 4 different species of tits in the garden so far today. The first Long Tail Tits for quite a while passed through late morning.