Wednesday 29 January 2014

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: 

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.


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


1 comment:

RSPB Liverpool Local Group. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is a registered charity: England and Wales no' 207076, Scotland no. SC037654 said...

It is always interesting to compare one's own observations in the context of a bigger group. This is why I am committed to recording for the BTO with GBW.
As far as Laura's comments go, I have to say that my BGBW observations were simply continuing the poor results I have been recording week by week for GBW. My winter results are not much better than my summer ones. Where have all the birdies gone?

David