You may remember that last Sunday I was taking part in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch and I wanted to share the photos with you and let you know how we got on.
Me, mom and hubby put out loads of wild bird seed, corn, peanuts, fat balls and suet blocks to tempt the birds into mum’s garden, catering for all birdy appetites! As soon as we went outside to top up the birdtables with tasty treats, all the birds scarpered so we retreated indoors and waited a good half an hour before the birds were brave enough to come back out. We to filled up the kettle and settled down with a cuppa and a teacake and started spotting.
I was in charge of the tick-sheet, so as the bird breeds were called out I quickly marked them down. The RSPB provided an excellent guidebook for the birdwatch with images of the kinds of birds that we could expect to find in a garden so it was easy to identify most of them. A few birds were a little obscure and we didn’t recognize them, so we looked in the Observer book of birds and found that often we were looking at the female version of a robin or chaffinch and so on.
Overall we spotted 31 birds which included blackbirds, blue tits, robins, great tits, dunnocks, coal tits, long-tail tits, chaffinches, moorhens, sparrows, collared doves, pigeons and I even spotted a pied woodpecker at the last minute!
It was a very relaxing way to spend an hour and I’ve learnt a lot of bird breeds just by flicking through the guide books. It was great fun and easy to do, was satisfying to report the findings back to the RSPB online, and it was essentially a cheap way to spend the day; you don’t need any binoculars or equipment, and really you don’t even need to put out bird food – just a few crumbs would attract them to the garden so that you can count them!