The tea and biscuits kind of wild with RSPB #BigGardenBirdWatch
Join the survey taking place 25th to 27th January 2020
What better way to start a blog about getting more involved with nature than with the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch. It is one of the biggest citizen science projects in the world and one of the easiest ways to start being a little bit more wild!
This year will be the 41st year the survey has run but will only be my second year taking part. I had wanted to be involved for years but only ever seemed to hear about it when the results were released. Then in summer 2018, in a bid to be better connected with wildlife events and communities, I joined Twitter. Counter-intuitively, joining this virtual community has made me much better able to feel a part of the natural world around me and in 2019 I was able to complete my first Big Garden Bird Watch survey.
Long term proponents of the survey will tell you how you can have every species of bird under the sun visiting your garden up until the hour of the survey, but the moment you sit down with your survey sheet everything just disappears and you have to submit your results with just a couple of blackbirds and a woodpigeon. There was an ominous lead up to my first survey which threatened that it might have such an outcome…
I was all set to do a survey of my back garden on the Sunday afternoon and had arranged for my friend (and ‘partner-in-wild’) Beka to join me. There was a perfect view over the garden from the bedroom window and the plan was to set up a couple of chairs, equip ourselves with tea, biscuits and binoculars and settle in for the hour. Birds don’t tend to show up at feeders in an orderly queue evenly spaced throughout the designated hour. They more tend to arrive en mass, fly all over the place, and then disappear. This makes it very helpful to have a fellow surveyor or two on hand to try and keep tabs of the unfolding chaos.
The reason I had some apprehension that we might have a disappointing survey outcome was that the evening before the big day I strolled out of my house to see a Peregrine Falcon circling over my house. Whilst it was really exciting to see it, the fear was it might scare away some of my regulars. This was compounded when the next morning, on entering the back garden to ensure the feeders were well stocked, I noticed a dense collection of pigeon feathers that could only really mean someone had fallen victim to the raptor.
Fortunately in the end we had a very respectable turn out of:
- 11 sparrows
- 3 blackbirds
- 2 blue tits
- 2 coal tits
- 2 collared doves
- 2 great tits
- 2 robins
- 1 magpie
- 1 goldfinch
- 1 starling
We even saw a Chiffchaff which was them first time I had seen one in that garden. There was, however, a noticeable absence of any woodpigeons!
This year Beka and I will of course be submitting our survey results for the second time. We face a different challenge this year in that I have moved from the house with the lovely big garden, and a collection of feeding stations, to a first floor flat looking out onto a car park. I still have hope that we will have some nice sightings. There are a lot of hedge rows in the garden, several trees and a fair amount of leaf litter. I also snuck out under cover of darkness and put up a couple of feeders where I think they will be out of the way, and crucially, not over where any cars will be parked! There are definitely a variety of birds around, they just won’t be gathering conveniently in a central feeding location and may take a bit work work and skill to spot. I will just consider it to be a level-up in the #BigGardenBirdWatch game!
If you would like to be involved in the #BigGardenBirdWatch you can sign up at the RSPB website. If you need help to identify your birds I have put together a handy presentation to help.
