Friday the 19th of June will be RSPB Scotland’s last live Breakfast Birdwatch (but we still want to see your photos!). To bring 3 months of Breakfast Birdwatch-ing to a close, RSPB Scotland’s Allie McGregor shares five of our highlights.
Five #BreakfastBirdwatch highlights
Draw A Bird Day
April 8th was Draw A Bird Day and some amazing artists showed off their work. Lots of the RSPB team also gave it a go to varying degrees of success – the Northern Ireland team are natural-born artists!
We were particularly blown away by this Capercaillie art:
And all said a big ‘aww’ at this offering from our colleague Jon:
Nicknames for birds
On April 22nd we did a special themed Breakfast Birdwatch sharing lots of regional nicknames for birds. The most delightful part of it was going on to learn so many more nicknames everyone has for some of our common garden visitors! As well as nicknames we shared some Gaelic names and Scots words as well.
Some of the loveliest replies from you all came when we shared some nicknames for long-tailed tits. While our initial research didn’t find many, you all quickly proved that to be untrue sharing your favourite alternatives such as lollipops, flying teaspoons and pom poms!
Dawn Chorus Day
On Sunday the 3rd we held and extra-special, extra-early Breakfast Birdwatch to celebrate Dawn Chorus Day. Kicking off at 5am we shared some snippets of the dawn chorus from across the UK and heaps of you joined in so we could all tune into even more beautiful bird song from across the country. It was a beautiful reminder of just one of the many amazing things we owe to nature, and an opportunity to reflect on why it is so important to protect nature and help it thrive.
I’m like a bird...
Our Wales team came up with one of the best birdwatch moments with their clever follow up to Dawn Chorus Day! The team pulled together a brilliant birdy paylist and everyone had plenty of additions to make. I don’t think many of us had ever appreciated just how many songs feature our feathered friends (I could still add more...).
Breakfast BeeWatch
We added a little twist to our birdwatch on 20 May to celebrate World Bee Day! Bees and other pollinators face many threats and they are absolutely crucial to a healthy environment.
#BreakfastBeewatch gave us a great opportunity to highlight the importance of bees and talk a bit about what we can do to help them. We were just blown away by how good everyone was at catching beautiful photos of them as they flew by too!
Even though this is our last week of live Breakfast Birdwatch we will still be checking out the hashtag and looking forward to seeing your photos (no matter what time of day they are taken!). We always love to see your nature and wildlife photos, please do keep sharing them with us on Facebook and Twitter.