SANTA delivered the ultimate Christmas present for Dúlra. And as if to bless the festive gift, this beautiful robin was the very first bird to arrive at the new feeding station which videos every single visitor.
And a free app allows you to watch each high-res clip on your phone.
In fact, for the last week Dúlra has barely looked out the kitchen window at all – you can birdwatch while sitting on the sofa! You get sent an alert with every new visitor and open the app immediately and see what’s eating the sunflower hearts outside.
The notifications mean you can switch to live at any time and watch the action in real time.
And this robin – Dúlra knows it’s the same one every time because its tail feathers are worse for wear – has got to be the best fed one in Belfast. As the week wore on, its belly seemed to get bigger. Every 20 minutes, Dúlra’s phone vibrated and he eagerly checked the app in the hope of seeing a rarity – only to see the plump robin with the ragged tail gobbling up more seeds.
At the start of the week Dúlra tied the feeder to a tree – you can screw it onto a fence as well – but this big plastic contraption is nothing like any of the hanging feeders that we’re used to. Even though the sunflower hearts are clearly visible, it was just too different for almost all the garden birds.
Birds live on their wits and are always on the lookout for traps. It takes them a while to accept any new feeder or even any new type of food – Dúlra recently put out shortbread biscuits along with the bread and it took them about a week to try them – but once they did, they gobbled them all up.
And so the big green Birdfy feeder with built-in camera is still a bit of an unknown in the garden. So far just three species have visited – the ragged-tailed robin, a blue tit and a starling.
All the other birds – sometimes scores of them – gather around the hanging feeders – which maybe is just as well or his phone would be constantly vibrating!
Technology is certainly changing the way people can enjoy birds – the first real breakthrough was getting cameras inside of nests, which now gives us a brilliant annual insight into the Lough Neagh barn owls and which is also used widely inside swift boxes. In fact a few years ago when swift supremo Mark Smyth was putting up a couple of boxes in Dúlra’s house, he was able to show Dúlra on his phone all 20 pairs which were incubating eggs in boxes at his own house in Antrim!
There’s even talk this year of thermal imaging cameras that can be used to find birds even in the thickest of vegetation or in the pitch dark. They have been used by researchers to count lapwing chicks with an accuracy that people never even got close to. Dúlra might have to get his hands on one to crack the biggest riddle of all – the nest of grasshopper warbler. He has searched for it every year among the rushes across the Belfast hills for decades now but to no avail.
Whatever about all those exotic birds, there’s a lot to be said for the common robin, spideog in Irish. They are among our tamest birds and don’t abandon our gardens in winter. Dúlra can’t help but smile every time he gets a notification and opens the app to see that flash of red breast. All the other birds can stick to the other feeders for all he cares.
The robin is our most trusting bird and this one had claimed the peculiar Birdfy feeder as its own within just 20 minutes of it going up.
Dúlra hopes that the robin stays around for spring and that those nutrient-rich sunflower seeds help it grow a new set of tail feathers – and that its shiny new plumage will help it find a mate and raise a family. And Dúlra can watch it all happen without leaving the sofa.
* If you’ve seen or photographed anything investing or have any nature questions, you can text Dúlra on 07801 414804.
