You may be hearing more and more about a little thing called the Big Garden Birdwatch over the coming weeks...ok, maybe it’s not so little. It is in fact the world’s biggest wildlife survey, and we had nearly 600,000 people take part across the nation in last year’s Birdwatch, which is absolutely fantastic!
If you haven’t taken part before (this will be my first year!), then here’s how it works...
You sit for one hour during the day over the weekend of the 25/26th of January (any hour you choose) and make a note of the birds that come into your garden – we’ll ask you to tot up the highest number of each species you see at any one time so you aren’t counting them twice. If you don’t have a garden, you can still take part in your local park or green space.
We’ll also be asking you to tell us about how often during the year you see other wildlife, such as hedgehogs, frogs and toads, badgers and deer, in order to get a better idea of how our wildlife is doing across the country.
The Big Garden Birdwatch has been running for 35 years, and is an incredibly important source of information for the RSPB to monitor how our garden bird populations are doing across the country. Your results mean that we can detect changes, whether good or bad, and go on to investigate the causes of declines in order to figure out a way to turn things around.
Last year’s results held some troubling news; starlings declined a further 16% after hitting an all time low in 2012. Other species, such as house sparrows, dunnocks and bullfinches also declined. But it’s not all doom and gloom – garden sightings of siskins, fieldfares and jays were up by as much as 85%! In this challenging time for wildlife, it’s especially important that we’re able to monitor what’s going on – noticing a decline is the first step on the road to reversing it, so this survey really is vital.
If you have an hour, please think about taking part – we’ll be having ‘birds for beginners’ workshops here at Fairburn on the weekends of the 11th&12th and 18th&19th of January to help you all with garden bird ID if you need a confidence boost! We’ll also be giving top tips on how to make your garden a haven for all wildlife this new year. We hope to see you there!
Find more info about the Big Garden Birdwatch, please go to www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch, or of course, you could come and see us at Fairburn Ings!