As a result of first the Christmas period, and now this freezing winter weather, most of the wildlife I have seen in the past month has been in our small, often snow-filled garden. (Having said that, there was one glorious day just before Christmas hunting for crossbills in the area around Woorgreens Nature Reserve in the Forest of Dean; flocks of them glowing a warm terracotta in the wintery sunshine and calling to each other overhead like the tinkling of a hundred sleigh-bells).

Our warm kitchen has made an excellent bird hide, and my family and I have seen all kinds of animals come and go. My wife Nancy in particular never misses even a fleeting visit by a new species.

The highlight has probably been the small gangs of goldfinches frequenting the bird table for the smaller seeds, but just as entertaining are the enormous numbers of sparrows endlessly chatting in the bush by the feeders and taking it in turns for their snack, or seeing the robin trying to get to grips with prizing out chunks of peanut before the other birds scare him off.

A pair of collared doves alternate between the bird table and staking out the patch on the ground underneath the birdfeeder that hangs outside the kids’ bedroom window. (It is not such a good location for a bird feeder, but they have really loved watching the birds brave enough to risk the journey – blue tits on the peanuts and dunnocks or sparrows when we put in seed).

We've had pied wagtails picking up the scraps spilled by the others, and a small flock of long-tailed tits who have decided to make our garden a part of their late afternoon round.

A single showy fieldfare and a more secretive female blackcap have taken up an odd-couple residence in our holly bush and are slowly working their way through the berries. He chases off any other birds that come near, except for her, presumably because she is not deemed to be enough of a threat to his food patch.

The starlings sit and watch all the activity from our roof like a crowd of awkward teenagers at a school disco: calling and whooping and imitating the others noisily from the sidelines, but rarely taking part in the action (at least while we’ve been watching).

It has also been fun to try out different kinds of food to attract different things: a recent tip-off in a pull out from Natural World magazine alerted me to the joy of sultanas, which the blackbirds do indeed love, although I have yet to experiment with live bait to make the robins’ lives easier.

I know that there is a serious side to all of this – that putting out a variety of feedstuffs (and importantly carrying on doing it continuously throughout the year) is a vital part of halting the decline in our once common birdlife – but we have been doing it more for the selfish pleasures of having all the birds there for us to see them and hear them.

It brings colour, energy and life to what in winter is often a drab and miserable garden scene. And in close-up even the little brown jobs become beautiful: the intricate grey and chestnut ripples on a dunnock’s neck are surely the equal of a hoopoe or a tiger’s stripes…