The beautiful colours of autumn can be clearly seen as the leaves change colour and gradually fall to the ground, unless of course you live near a pine-tree or eucalyptus plantation. Those of you who live in the countryside can see the birds flying from tree to tree or scavenging in the grass looking for food. Of course in the towns parks are good places to see the birds and spot the last butterflies and bees of the year taking nectar from the last flowers. But perhaps the nicest thing of all is to hear the robin singing, even on a fairly bad day. The robin is an eternal optimist which we often consider to be one of “our” birds but truth to tell the robin you hear singing is probably from the north-east of Europe as many robins migrate to more favourable winter climates.
If you have a garden or even a balcony, watching birds can be made more fun by leaving scraps of food for them but please don`t leave bread or anything salty. You can buy feeders in some of the bigger garden centres and Urdaibai Bird Centre makes them and sells them. If you are good at making things yourself there are always useful videos on YouTube (more in English than Spanish). There are basically two types of feeders, one for seeds and another for peanuts (we sell the peanuts in BBT but unfortunately this year we don`t have any feeders). If you want, you can also take part in the Garden Birds survey organized by the Bird Centre. It’s good fun and you’ll learn a lot!
It’s also a good time to put up bird-boxes so the birds can get used to seeing them. Here again you can make your own, a lovely experiment to do with your kids, or you can buy them. Different types of birds need specific entrance hole dimensions. You often see bird boxes that look nice but are really impractical. The Bird Centre sells them but we have some bird-boxes on sale in BBT made by local bird expert, Josean Isasi. Josean is responsible for almost all the bird-boxes that you can see in the parks in Mungia. Every year he inspects them, registers the species of bird using them and cleans them in winter. As well as that, he often offers work-shops to the schools involved in the Agenda 30 project. The boxes that we have on sale are beautiful boxes but very practical as well. They also come with a perch for putting them over the branch of a tree. If you want to buy one don`t forget that our opening-hours have changed so it`s open from Wednesday to Friday at specific hours.
