Jan 25th & 26th RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch Weekend 2020

It is that time of year again. The final weekend of January marks the RSPB's annual Big Garden Birdwatch weekend. For the 41st time, the nation gets to help out with a survey to monitor the population of Britain's garden birds. The survey is pretty straight forward, sit and watch your garden for an hour and count the birds that enter it. Though to stop you from counting the same bird twice, you need to count how many of each species that visit at a single time. For example, if you see one robin, you can't add another until you see two robins at the same time. Anyone can take part and you don't have to be an expert.

Yesterday, to promote the survey, I went to volunteer at an event at Waterloo Park (my local patch). Last year, the event was extremely popular and even had a celeb to promote it. This year, however, there were quite a lot of cut backs and it wasn't as well advertised as it was a year ago, in other words, fewer families showed up. But for the ones that did show, they enjoyed making feeders, etc. I was at my own tent showing families the birds that were visiting the feeders we set up to attract them.

Long-tailed Tit

While at my little birding station, we were recording the bird species found in and above the park. The results after 4 hours standing in the cold (mostly from one spot) were; 2 robins, 3 dunnocks, 5 blackbirds, 8 blue tits, 6 great tits, 7 greenfinches, 2 collard doves, 15 woodpigeons, 7 black-headed gulls, 3 chaffinches, 2 herring gulls, 7 goldfinches, 2 magpies, 8 feral pigeons, 1common gull, 2 jays, 1 song thrush, 6 house sparrows, 2 carrion crows, 1 wren, 3 long-tailed tits, 1 coal tit and 5 starlings.

Today, I did my usual annual rounds at my parent's and my aunt's gardens. First up was my parent's garden. It was a pretty productive hour up until half way through when one of the neighbour's cats appeared briefly and it got really quiet after it saw us and ran back the way it came. If it didn't appear, I'd expect it would have been more successful. Our results in the end were; 1 wren, 4 long-tailed tits, 2 blue tits, 1 blackbird and 2 dunnocks. Then, at my Aunt Barbara's garden, we had; 2 woodpigeons, 2 collard doves, 1 robin, 1 dunnock and one chaffinch. Not too bad from my two urban gardens this year.