About three weeks late actually! Today I did the first of two scheduled visits to count birds as part of the BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) and I've usually done it at the beginning of May.
The BBS provides the information on which much of our information on changes in common breeding birds is based. Volunteer observers, like me, make two visits in spring/summer to a 1km square and record all the birds on each of two 1km transects.
This is the fifth year I have covered this particular square - a potentially dull area of arable crops with a green lane cutting through the farmland. But nowhere is dull when you get to know it. It's because I can compare this visit with previous ones that makes it much more interesting for me - and the fact that we can compare this year's visits with earlier years across over 1000 randomly-selected sites across the UK that makes it such a powerful monitoring tool.
It was a sunny morning with a light easterly wind - a heavy dew soaked my shoes within minutes of starting. Not surprisingly, I didn't see another person.
It all seemed pretty birdless to me. There were plenty of chaffinches and wrens, and a few skylarks but not as many as usual, I thought. The odd yellowhammer. A reed bunting in the oil seed rape. And a cuckoo - I don't think I've heard many of those here.
As I squidged back in my soaking shoes just after 07:00 it felt like a job well done but I was fairly sure that bird numbers were down on the usual counts. A painted lady flew past - an early riser for an insect!
But when I got home, entered the data online, and looked at the counts from previous years I cheered up a bit. The numbers weren't actually very different from the average of the past four years! That's the great value of well-designed and documented surveys rather than relying on the unreliable memories of individuals. Whitethroats may be down a bit (although lots of people tell me that they have more than usual!) but I have already this year seen more great-spotted woodpeckers than in the previous four years combined, today's cuckoo was the second since I started and today's mistle thrush was the first ever. Let's see what the second visit in three weeks time will bring.
But even if bird numbers haven't declined since last year, this is still a walk which delivers rather little wildlife. The birds, wild flowers and interesting insects are all pushed to the sides of the enormous fields into the poor, unmanaged hedges. There is no evidence of any wildlife management or deployment of environmental schemes to help nature here. It feels like what it is - a walk around the factory floor of a highly efficient industry. This industry's products are commodities - wheat and rape seed. Wildlife here has to cling on as best it can - it isn't being given much help.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.