We’ve been enjoying the birdfeeder in the back garden. It’s nice to sit on the couch and watch them flit back and forth between the branches, the hedge, and the feeder. The cats love sitting in that window, too. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) organized a nationwide birdwatching event this weekend.
In 2007, over 400,000 people took part by counting the birds in their garden for an hour. Together they spotted 6 million birds across 236,000 gardens, helping reveal the winners and losers in the garden bird world. Over the past three decades participants have made a significant contribution to monitoring garden bird numbers and helped highlight that some garden birds are in need of help. The survey has recorded the huge declines in some of our most familiar birds. Since 1979, the number of house sparrows counted has fallen by 52% and the number of starlings by 76%. However, it isn’t all bad news – chaffinchs and great tits have both seen their numbers increase since 1979 by 36 and 52 per cent respectively. Our scientists can then use these patterns in bird numbers to help prioritise our bird conservation work.
I spent a nice hour with the cats yesterday morning, counting birds and drinking coffee!
Here are some of the birds we commonly see in our garden:
The blue tit
The chaffinch
The collared dove
The dunnock
The great tit
The greenfinch
The robin
The blackbird
January 28th, 2008 at 2:55 am
Hi Andy–What a great way to spend an hour!! How many birds did you count? Did you send your count in? And are the pictures scanned from a bird book or did you take them? I look forward to enjoying birdwatching too! Love, Dana