Diary: April 2003

Last year I put up a couple of home-made boxes on a wall close to our kitchen window. I made the holes large enough for house sparrows (32mm diameter), hoping to tempt them into starting a small colony. So far there have been no signs of interest from the sparrows (there's no accounting for taste), but I've seen blue tits investigating on a couple of occasions. I've also seen blue tits investigating a plastic box at the front of the house. This box was already in situ when we moved in about five years ago and has been used successfully a couple of times.

Meanwhile just outside the window of the office where I work, a male house sparrow has started a little nest building on a very precarious ledge under a steel spiral fire-escape staircase. He should come round here - much better accommodation going cheep! (Groan!)

When its a tadpole of course. Over the last couple of days the earliest of my pond's frogspawn has started to look much less like spawn and more like tiny tadpoles. Today, on one batch of spawn there were several groups of the tiny inactive tadpoles clustered quite close together - closer than they could get unless they were actually free of the gelatinous remains of their spawn. So I now consider that I have tadpoles in the new pond! I will duly record this at the UK Phenology Network's website.