OneGuyFromBarlick

I think it is because it's the harshest time of the year for the garden birds, may give a better measure than when food and environmental conditions are better. Nothing on the website that I can see but I suppose as long as they use the same period each year it will give a useful result. Starlings, House Sparrows, Song Thrushes and Greenfinches are the ones most at risk based on the results from the last 35 years.

RSPB Big Garde Birdwatch Results 1979 - 2013

I hope everyone is keeping up with the feeding of their garden birds. This years RSPB Garden Bird Watch is this coming weekend 24th-25th Janaury 2015. Please register and pick an hour at some point over the weekend to log your visitors. All the information is on the website below. This is the main event each year for monitoring our garden birds.

RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch 2015

We don't `feed' the birds, meaning we don't put out bread, nuts, fat balls etc. We once did but it resulted in sparrows taking over the garden and aggressively fighting any other type of bird that tried to come in for food. We stopped putting out food and planted berry shrubs and small trees such as cotoneaster, pyrocantha, mahonia, hawthorn, blackthorn, crab apple etc. Now we get lots of different types of bird coming in to eat the berries and also to nest.

Excellent Tiz, unfortunately our small front garden won't support your model but our feeder does attract a reasonable cross section of our local bird population. Cant say that any one species is dominant other than the raids by the anarchic Starlings that descend when odd bits of bread are put out. They are only here for about 5 minutes though which is all the time it takes for them to decimate the offerings. Their action on the post feeder though serves our ground feeder visitors such as the Blackbirds and Thrushes to the scatterings. I'm thinking of supplementing the offerings to our regular pair of Blackbirds with a few of the brandlings from our composter, they will like that. Will you be taking part in the survey?

Yes, Mrs Tiz will be keen to do the survey. We have a couple of dwarf apple trees and the starlings and blackbirds love picking at the windfalls. Another reason we stopped putting out peanuts was that, like you describe, they were all gone in a flash! The most unusual visitor we saw on our peanut feeder was a tiny mouse which I'm sure must have been a harvest mouse. It was smaller than a field or house mouse and jumped from a twig to the side of the feeder where it easily clung on whilst eating. What was even more strange was that I slowly walked up to the feeder and it didn't run away; I got so close that I reached out and stroked its back and it just kept on eating! When I tried to do it again to show Mrs Tiz it jumped back into the bush and disappeared. Never seen one since.

Our Starlings only seem to go for the bread offerings (a quick fix with little effort). Your close encounter with the small rodent must have been a bit magical Tiz. I used to enjoy the very bold Robins that would perch on my rod eyeing the bait boxes when coarse fishing on the canal in Winter. Close interaction with nature in the raw is always rewarding.

We shall be doing it.

And me...

Do not forget, all details on how to take part can be found on rspb website. It's quite amazing how many different species you see when you make a concerted effort to watch them.

It's that time again, RSPB Garden Bird Watch. Just done ours and of course all our regular visitors were absent in the quantities we normally have visiting. We still had our Collard Dove pair, Starlings, Blackbird, Song Thrush, Sparrow, Blue Tit, Coal Tit, Dunnock and a Wood Pigeon though. I bet it will be throng later on.

RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch

It's any hour over this weekend, you don't have to have a garden, you can watch an area in a park if you wish. All info on the site.

It's including Monday as well this year.

Yes, sorry I missed that out, 28th-30th January.

It's here again, the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch.

27th to 29th January, all weekend and Monday as well. Choose your hour and record what you see. Don't forget to upload your results to the website. This is the annual census of bird population in the UK.

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch

Doing it tomorrow.

This years results are out and here are the top 10 observed this year.

1. House Sparrow
2. Blue Tit
3. Starling
4. Wood-Pigeon
5. Blackbird
6. Robin
7. Goldfinch
8. Great Tit
9. Magpie
10. Long-Tailed Tit

Our top bird is the Jackdaw!

Aye, but do they visit your garden? Or are they just seen from afar on the rooftops, we have three pairs visible from our house but they don't qualify as they don't visit.

In that case my garden is birdless.....