A battered Big Garden Birdwatch

Well the Big Garden Birdwatch proved to be a bit of battle for our resilient counters. The chosen weekend with it high winds, heavy rain, hailstorms and thunder and lightning, was atrocious, the RSPB couldn’t have picked a better weekend...not.

Laura from Liverpool RSPB undertook a mini scouse birdwatch count, 17 households across Merseyside and Warrington sent in their counts which you can see on the tables below. 

Adjectives used to describe results and experiences read - disappointing, poor, awful, missing, nothing unusual, arrived later  and down. According to twitter and the on BBC's Winterwatch we weren’t alone, the feeling was nationwide and the count was further exasperated by the RSPB website crashing, hopefully just overwhelmed by the response! 

I’m sure you’ll draw your own conclusions from the table, and certainly the weather appears to have affected the counts, as many people stated they had regulars missing and numbers even halved from a more usual winters day count.

I was not surprised to see goldfinches at the top as these birds have been in ascendancy in recent years, indeed from our table the finches were more prevalent in gardens than our poor sparrows and starlings

Neither was I surprised to see wood pigeon in the top 10 either , these birds moving in to suburbia from their more traditional farmland habitat.

Once again House sparrows and starlings showing a worrying trend with only 5/6 households out of 17 having them visit. 

Blackbirds were top of the list for presence, followed by bluetit.

Not a sniff of mistle and song thrushes anywhere, with only fieldfare arriving in our Warrington garden. Perhaps the weather is too mild, I usually only get the thrushes when it snows!

A little comparison count was included, sent in by our BTO friend Bob who lives in Shropshire.  I was expecting to see more farmland birds than rook, jackdaws and fieldfare, but he did have a great count of 32 H sparrows – apparently 60 arrived after his count! Obviously the rural habitat suits this flock and maybe it will give us a few pointers on what we should be doing in town. Bob rings his sparrows as part of the BTO's bird survival project: 

http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/ringing/surveys/ras/about-ras

For those of you who have enjoyed taking part in the big garden birdwatch and would like to record more, please consider joining the BTO garden birdwatch , this will involve you recording your birds every week and uploading them to the BTO. The count includes other nature sightings such as insects & mammals and also records the type of food you put out, more recently they have included your sightings of diseased & dead specimens.

 http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/gbw

Many thanks to all those who took part in my little survey, I hope you find it of interest, please free  to add you comments, observations  on our blog.

`Bob’s Shropshire			Total seen	Of 17 Mersey gardens/green spaces
3		Blackbird	42	16 Gardens
		Blackcap	1	1
5		Blue tit	22	13
3		Chaffinch	15	8
		Coal tit	4	3
2		Collared dove	5	3
		Crow	6	2
2		Dunnock	9	7
9		Fieldfare
6		Goldfinch	65	9
		Greenfinch	10	6
		Grey wagtail	1	1
		Gt spotted woodpecker	2	2
4		Gt tit	14	10
32		House Sparrow	31	5
3		Jackdaw
		Long tailed tit	8	3
1		Magpie	17	10
		Pied wagtail	1	1
		Pigeon feral	22	4
		Redwing	5	1
2		Robin	13	11
1		Rook
		Sparrowhawk	1	1
3		Starling	34	6
		Wood pigeon	29	12
		Wren	1	1

	Top 10 2014	Total seen	% of 17 gardens
1	Goldfinch	65	53%
2	Blackbird	42	94.%
3	Starling	34	37.5%
4	H sparrow	31	31.25%
5	W pigeon	29	70%
6	Blue tit	22	76%
7	Feral pigeon	22	23%
8	Magpie	17	62.50%
9	Chaffinch	15	47%
10	G tit	14	62.50%

Merseyside 2013
1	Merseyside	Blackbird
2	Merseyside	House sparrow
3	Merseyside	Starling
4	Merseyside	Blue tit
5	Merseyside	Woodpigeon
6	Merseyside	Goldfinch
7	Merseyside	Collared dove
8	Merseyside	Magpie
9	Merseyside	Robin
10	Merseyside	Feral pigeon