Annual Bird Count

We participated today in the RSPB's annual Big Garden Birdwatch. From our sitting room we have a good view of the main feeding area for our small birds, so we sat in comfort for an hour around midday to count how many birds we saw. It's a relatively easy process: one simply notes the maximum number seen of each species on the feeders or in the bushes or on the ground so, although chaffinches were constantly coming and going, the number that mattered was seven, the most we saw at any one time.

The process wasn't without problems. The neighbour's cat decided to count the birds too, and....

....a wood pigeon ate most of the extra seed we had put out to attract the birds, but we ended up with fairly representative numbers: seven chaffinches, two each of dunnocks, goldfinches and siskins, and one each of blackbirds, robins, house sparrows, blue tits, coal tits, and.... that fat pigeon.