Just a reminder that this year's RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch is being held on Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th January - http://www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch/
we haven't got a big garden!
I haven't even got a garden! :)
An allotment would probably count.
Bugloss, you don't need a big garden. You will be asked to tick a box showing the size of it when you register.
actually I was going to look over the fence into next door's and just hope they weren't doing it too :D
You have looked over my garden on photobucket, and the trouble is how do you count the birds if there are to many in the garden at one time?
You estimate. If you've got a mass of sparrows, you count 10, and if the if the flock occupies ten times the space taken by the ten, you've got 100.
Bump, its this weekend.
This is the weekend the birds disappear ;D
Thanks Carol you beat me to it!
Too true, and based on what I've seen the past few days I'll be lucky to get into double figures with half of them being wood pigeons! :)
our back garden has been full of birds for last few days, 16 species in an hour!!
Looking forward to it - My first time <blush>
I am hoping my four long eared owls will be in situ. They have been there since my OH first spotted them on 19th December last year. ;D
well this morning we've had a sparrowhawk and a dozen long tailed tits. Course tomorrow when it's time to do the counting, the garden will look like Aberdeen on a Flag Day
Our Goldfinches didn't appear, but managed to clock up 13 species in all. Included was a song thrush I hadn't seen in the garden before so that was a bonus. Mind I did forget to get my glasses out of the car & the other half took off at 5 this morning to go walking so I might have mistaken a couple of far off ones for sparrows ::)
It does say garden or park so I don't suppose they would mind an allotment - I plan on doing there although results may just be wood pigeons and magpies!
May have been covered before but for anyone who really likes this sort of thing BTO continual garden birdwatch is great fun to do and also covers other things like butterflies/bumble bees/mammals.... It does cost £15 a year though. The website is http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/gbw. I've been doing for over 10 years now.
I counted 16 species - even the long-tailed tits put in an appearance after an absence of a couple of days. Well pleased.
Tricia
I did my count this morning when I saw all the usual birds and my first ever male blackcap! :)
http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/b/blackcap/index.aspx
Finished inputting the results of ours and we have quite a few in here.
The only thing to spoil it was at the end of a hours worth of watching a sparrowhawk came and had a little bird to have for their tea.
Oh well that's life and death in the wild.
Still been a good experience for the youngest to get used to all the different birds that visit our little garden.
I had the same problem with the Sparrowhawk. I put out the mid day seed and stood watching to do the count over the hour, along came Mrs Sparrowhawk and swooped into the trees where the wee birds were thinking of eating and put them off for a good half hour. Still Mrs SHawk was another bird to be added. I too, had a visit from the Long Tailed Tits during the count. Only absence were the Rooks and Jackdaws. The farmer was ploughing in the field so I guess they were following the plough!!.
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.
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.
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.