Topic: Big Garden Birdwatch 2011

[Paulines7]

I saw a buzzard land in the field adjacent to my garden.  A few minutes later he flew off with what looked like a mole or small rat in his talons.

My long eared owls are getting more difficult to spot amongst the foliage now.  I could see one quite clearly and then I spotted the tail of another one as was perching.  They are not included in the count though but I put them in the box for other birds seen. 

I had more finches than anything else, mainly chaffinches and goldfinches with only two greenfinches.

The female blackcap is a regular visitor to the feeding station and was there to be counted.  The male blackcap who used to accompany her disappeared last week one afternoon and she was very distressed.  She called to him for several days.  At the time he disappeared, I noticed an owl sitting in full view about 6' from the ground and not in the normal roosting tree.  Blackcaps are not ground feeders so it is unlikely to have been a cat that caught him.

[Obelixx]

I live in Belgium and they do their bird count a bit later on.  However, I do like to keep an eye on my visitors and today we have our first starlings ever.  Only a dozen or so buut they've figured out the different feeders very quickly and will, I hope, return.

I've only once seen a small flock of long tailed tits too but we get regular blue, great, coal and marsh tots to make up for it and have a healthy flowk of sparrows resident in the eaves.  Chaffinches, blackbirds, wrens, dunnocks, woodpeckers, turtle doves and robins make up the rest of our regular visitors with an occasional green woodpecker in summer.

We have a regular sparrowhawk too and there are buzzards and egrets and herons and mallards and moorhens and coots and Egyptian geese in the paddocks next door and across the road.  Occasionally one or two visit our garden and investigate our pond.  Never on counting day of course.

[Robert_Brenchley]

We normally have loads of long-tailed tits on the allotments; they go around in noisy family parties. The cold winters hammer them though; they were starting to recover from the winter before last by the end of the breeding season, and this winter will have knocked them back again.