My morning

Wish I had great fat breasts!!?

Magpies like to eat eggs of other birds, particularly blackbirds.

Nasty black and white things and not even melodic!

SGreyduster - apparently goldfinches have gone off Niger seed and moved on to sunflower hearts! Certainly nothing touches the Niger seed in our feeders. It's the fat balls that are really popular at the moment for all our birds. (Except the pesky pigeons)

DH also hates magpies. They know when he is getting out of his chair to rush over to the window to chase them away and before he gets there they flap of into the bushes. I hate these predator birds. I once saw a jay catch a sparrow in mid air.

We have four goldfinches who take turns very politely on the niger seeds. Never had any until I started putting those seeds in a feeder. They will eat sunflower hearts if they can but the parakeets usually beat them to it.
I read that peanuts are bad for birds in the spring as fledglings can choke on them, so I tried whole sunflower seeds instead. The lovely but greedy parakeets can empty that in an hour and the mess of seed husks underneath is appalling.
Has anyone any suggestions on a better peanut substitute?

Oh I'm really glad about that now we have bought a b****y great bagful of the stuff!?. We do get them around the garden - they just don't come down. They will sit on the tv ariel and twitter away. Probably saying "when is she going to get some sunflower seeds?"

Oh I shouldn't have looked at this thread while I can't sleep. I feel very sad now as well.

Apparently all baby birds should be fed on insects so DH announced yesterday that he's not putting out any more feed until the sparrows etc clear the blackfly from our mock orange thing. They've cleaned the roses of greenfly very nicely but obviously black fly isn't as tasty. They've done a good job in previous years. Definelty no peanuts and the pigeons are sulking.