Next weekend is the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, where they everyone is asked to make a note of the bird species they see in their garden, or local park, for just one hour. Results are the submitted to the RSPB. The results help build up a picture of the bird population in the UK. Over 600,000 of us took part in Big Garden Birdwatch 2011 and counted over 10 million birds. The RSPB website summarises the results from last year’s birdwatch.
House sparrows retained top spot for the eight year running, with an average of four seen per garden.
Starlings and blackbirds swapped positions on the 2011 leader board, with starlings now at number two and blackbirds at number three.
Starling sightings increased by a quarter since 2010, but their numbers are still down from when Big Garden Birdwatch began in 1979.
I always take part, but this year, I wanted to do something a little different and also use my live cams as well in some way. One of my Twitter followers, Paul, suggested I could use my live cams and get people to tweet about what they had seen and that got me thinking! I have created a page on my website about what I plan to do next weekend and how you can get involved too.
For more details, take a look at this page on my website.
Basically, I am going to have two challenges:
On Saturday, I will do my hour birdwatch and log all the species I see and publish these on my website. I am also going to attempt to get a decent photograph of every species that visits my garden. I will upload all of these into a ‘Garden Birdwatch 2012’ set on my Flickr account. If you would like to do the same, then upload your photos into a set on your Flickr account and email me the link. I can then put a slideshow of your photos on my website. It would be good to share them in this way and interesting to see what different species others have seen.
On the Sunday, my live cameras will be focused on the bird feeders. Over the hour between 11am and midday, I am asking people to join me watching my live cams and we’ll see how many different species we can spot on the cams. I will attempt to screen capture them all! We can use twitter to log our results using the hashtag symbol; #WKcambirdwatch
It would be great to share this event next weekend with you and I look forward to seeing what we can see. This weekend I have had three bullfinches returning to the garden and the blackcap is still around. It would be great to get him on my count!