At the end of March or mid-April, old acquaintances will arrive - starlings, these cute, cheerful, sociable birds, the first migratory guests, joyful heralds of spring. Starlings live in flocks. In spring and summer they are black, with a bright shine; in autumn, white streaks appear in their plumage. This bird is lively, cheerful, with good hearing and musical memory. The true starling song should only be heard in the early morning. The air warmed up a little, and the starlings had already settled on high branches and began their concert. In his singing you can hear nightingale trills, and the sharp meow of an oriole, and the sweet voice of a robin, and the thin whistle of a titmouse, and the cackling of a hen, and the creaking of a door, and the croaking of frogs, and the barking of dogs, and the knocking of a woodpecker, and the voice of a jackdaw, and the croaking of a crow. , and the chirping of a sparrow...

For starlings, people make birdhouses (according to special rules and hang them from March 21 to April 10) or fix up old ones.

The sparrows imagined that this courtesy was being done for them, and immediately, at the first warmth, they occupied the birdhouses. This sparrow is an amazing bird: nimble, a rogue, a thief, a bully, a brawler.. He will spend the whole winter ruffled under a roof or in the depths of a dense spruce, feeding on what he finds on the road, and just in spring he climbs into someone else’s nest, which is closer to the house - in the starling or swallow.

Having arrived, the starlings inspect last year's familiar places, and then the eviction of the sparrows begins. Usually starlings sit in twos high above the birdhouses, peering intently down. As soon as the sparrow flies out to eat, like the starling, stone down and already at home. And the sparrow’s temporary economy has already come to an end. Starlings guard the nest in turns: one sits and the other flies on business.

Having settled in the nest, the starling begins to carry: moss, cotton wool, feathers, fluff, rags, straw, dry blades of grass. He makes the nest very deep, so that a cat does not crawl in with its paw or a raven sticks its long predatory beak through it. They cannot penetrate further: the entrance hole is quite small, no more than five centimeters in diameter.

In the spring, a starling never looks for its food, either in the air, or on the fly, like swallows, or on a tree, like a nuthatch or woodpecker. Its food is on the ground and in the ground. During the summer, it exterminates all kinds of insects harmful to the garden and vegetable garden a thousand times its weight! But he spends his entire day in continuous motion.

Woodpeckers will find an old, rotten aspen in the forest. They take turns digging a deep hollow for two weeks. The bottom is covered with sawdust - the nest is ready.

If you approach an aspen tree and knock with a stick, the chicks will squeal loudly and look out of the hollow. They don’t know how to fly yet; they crawl along the walls of hollows.

The woodpecker is a arboreal bird. It hollows out diseased trees and uses its long tongue to remove pest beetles and their larvae. The woodpecker is fed, but the forest is benefited (proverb).

It works from morning to evening: it rests against the trunk with its elastic tail, hooks on with strong legs and chisels with a beak as strong as a chisel. Then he inserts a long, sticky, jagged tongue into the hollowed out hole, onto which insects stick and prick, and sends them into the mouth.

The upper part of the body is black and the underparts are white. There are black feathers on the head; males have a red spot on the back of the head. There are many white spots on the wings.

Wood grouse, black grouse, hazel grouse, nutcrackers love the taiga...

The hazel grouse has three salvations in the snow: the first is to sleep warmly under the snow, the second is that the snow drags various seeds with it to the ground from the trees for the hazel grouse to eat, and the third is to hide from the hawk. Under the snow, the hazel grouse looks for seeds, makes passages there and opens upward for air.

The black grouse does not run under the snow, it hides from bad weather and from enemies (hawks). The largest bird is the wood grouse (forest rooster). In the summer, when blueberries, lingonberries, and blueberries ripen, they feed on berries. And on the banks of streams, wood grouse peck small pebbles, so that in their stomach the pebbles, like millstones, grind the berries. In winter, capercaillie feeds on pine needles. Pebble-ki-millstones grind them. In the spring, as soon as the snow melts, wood grouse begin to talk - to sing their spring songs. The capercaillie walks on the ground like a turkey, spreading its tail like a fan, and clicking its beak, as if two sticks are knocking against each other. And the song ends as if a knife is being sharpened on a whetstone. At the end of the song he goes deaf, that's why he was called the wood grouse.

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