Thanks for the link, I'll explore it.
The weather is still quite cold here, there was even quite a bit of snow today, so I've only made one half-open nestbox for birds and have done almost nothing for insects (I only cut few dozen tubes (of different diameters) from some tubular plant and one from reed (Phragmites) - I picked more of this material but haven’t had time to cut it yet - https://i.ibb.co/7ghxzNQ/20240319-125715.jpg (the walls of the stems are quite hard but still managed to cut it using only a regular "school" jigsaw), now I need to sand the edges of the tubes with sandpaper and also to knock together suitable sized wooden boxes to place the tubes there).

For those people who want to learn more about insects in their country not only in theory but also in practice, I would also advise to find a local forum about insects/or at least a thread about beneficial insects on a gardening forum - there you may find information about the habitat and characteristics of such insects in your region, the time of year and place when and where these insects are active, the ''natural enemies'' of such insects from which they need to be protected, and also read personal experience of people who made houses for insects and what material (including plants) they used.
I've found this topic - https://forum.vinograd.info/showthread.php?t=4267 (it can also be used by residents of Belarus and Russia) where I learned that to make houses for osmia bees you can use reeds that grow here in the water (along banks of rivers) if its diameter is suitable - I read that these bees settled in tubes whose inner diameter was 8 mm (although it is better to go in search for this plant either in frosty winter when the water in a river/pond is frozen enough to walk there or at the end of summer when the water level is lower). It is also possible to use Jerusalem artichoke stems, for example, if to remove the inner pulp of the stem (using drill/or some other suitable tool that is long and thin).
From a horticultural point of view, these bees can be especially helpful for pollinating those fruit trees that bloom early and that are very vulnerable to returns of spring frosts here - such as apricot, for example.
I also came across information on foreign websites that wild bees in general need more protection than domestic ones - https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/sci-tech/s ... s/46731858
So it seems that, if done properly, houses for such wild bees can be really helpful (for the bees, gardening, and nature in general).


Oh, it will be sad if there is no way to feed robins and blackbirds, they are both nice birds, I hope the dove will find some other source of food somewhere.
If to exclude fatty oat flakes, the rest of the food will not have enough calories for blackbirds, right?
I've seen and heard this dove here in the city, but I've never seen the bird at a bird feeder.

Good luck with the insect hotel(s).

The last time I bought bird food in my local garden centre I noticed that the store's insect section was almost as large as the bird section. So insect hotels seem to be really booming at the moment. Funnily enough, the hotels you could buy there all resembled the one the entomologist site I pointed to advised against...



It's a small world. One day before I read this a red bee tried to move into my roller shutter casing. Google said it must have been an osmia – I had never heard of osmias before – and it also said it's a herald of spring, the days of frost are over.



Rather, the problem is that you can't feed much else to them. Blackbirds and robins love fatty flakes and raisins but don't really care for other stuff typically found in feeders. In a couple of videos I've seen blackbirds eat hemp seeds and robins eat peanut pieces and peeled sunflower seeds but they much prefer soft food.

Apart from soft flakes and raisins, there's also the option to buy live insects / live worms or larvae (very appropriate in the breeding season) but… poor live food… I just couldn't do that.

Another option is various types of butter for garden birds but then I'd need a special feeder which I couldn't hang anywhere because there are just no suitable trees or other structures here, and I don't even know whether blackbirds in general or these particular individuals here are interested in butter at all. Also, it seems likely that butter will create a mess in the surrounding area and soon turn rancid in hot weather.

Flakes and raisins are simply many soft bills's favourite feeder content and so easy to handle.