Kitchen Garden Forum

It's that time of year again!

26-27 January 2013

http://www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch/

Well once again Alan, our Birdwatch was a virtual wipeout. Every morning at the crack of dawn my husband goes out to restock the bird table and bird feeders, especially in this recent bad weather and we've been rewarded by all kinds of birds visiting us.

So we were expecting to "bag" a reasonable section for our Birdwatch session. What did we get? Virtually zilch. One red kite swooping down briefly to grab a piece of fat, and one blue tit.

This is the third year on the trot this has happened. We reckon that our neighbours must get whipped up with enthusiasm one week-end of the year and swamp the area with bird seed and other bird goodies to the extent that the local birds go on a week-end binge and try out the new avian restaurants in the locality. Come tomorrow when all the surplus food has disappears the miserable little bu**ers will come back home and expect normal service to be resumed. Does anybody else suffer the same problem?.

We didn't log as many as usual, largely because of the strong wind which was keeping most of the smaller birds sheltering.

Fortunately we did the survey on Saturday when the snow was deep, so we got 21 species, one less than the day before as the treecreeper didn't show up. When it had thawed on Sunday I only got 12 species, so quite a good tally. I usually see about 14 or 15 species in normal weather unless the sparrowhawk is concentrating on targeting the feeders and most things keep clear for a week or two until he loses interest.

The Jays didn't come either. It has been funny watching them as they manage to fill their crop with 13 peanuts before they can't swallow any more and then just take another one in their beak. Both Jays have the same capacity! The woodpigeon manages 22 before it can't stuff any more down.

We did ours Saturday too with 12 species (could have been 13 but we only thought we saw a wren as it moved too quickly) - glad we did as fewer birds appeared once the snow had thawed.

My theory is that some people just pop food out during Birdcount weekends and the birds tale advantage of bonus food knowing that they can always come back to regular supplies later.

Very disloyal really

The only bird I counted (on Sunday morning) was a solitary blackbird.