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| Gold finches on Nyger Feeder |
So, coffee in one hand, small pair of binoculars in the other, one hour of intense garden monitoring commenced! The day was cloudy, cold but dry and the task: to record as part of the RSPB's annual
Big Garden Bird Watch, bird species and the highest number of individuals of each species seen in just sixty minutes.
The RSPB's fully automated reporting system challenged one of my results. I'll come back to this. Here is the score for a garden that is smaller then a tennis court (a metric used by the RSPB) and which is close to farmland and well equipped with bird tables and feeders:
Pied wagtail 1
Starlings 22
Blackbirds 3
Great tits 3
Feral pigeons 19
Robin 1
House sparrows 6
Chaffinches 5
Coal Tits 2
Blue Tit 1
Wood Pigeons 1
Magpie 2
Collared Doves 2
Gold finches 5
Dunnock 1
Some gulls also flew over but these don't count. So that was a total 15 species.
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| Pied wagtail (juvenile) |
Not seen but regularly present in the garden are wrens (apparently having a tough winter because of the cold), black caps, long-tailed tits and carrion crows. The spectacular gold finches arrived in just the last few minutes of the survey and a small flock of long-tailed tits arrived an hour too late. The feral pigeon numbers are well up on previous years as the word has clearly gone around pigeon-land that we are a soft touch for easy handouts.
Also arriving too late was the juvenile pied wagtail pictured here, which was very promptly seen off by the resident adult.
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| Pied wagtail juvenile |
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| Pied wagtail (dominant) adult |
The record challenged by the RSPB's web-based system was the number of starlings. The programme was obviously checking for mistakes but twenty two was correct (meticulously counted as they rapidly bounced from feeding on the lawn to hiding and preening in the fringing hedgerow) and about half the size of of the starling flock that regularly is seen here in the summer.
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| Another regular garden visitor - the North American grey squirrel |
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