Archive
DON’T FORGET THE BIRD COUNT
16/01/2025
This month, between 24th and 26th January, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is running its next garden bird watch. Everyone with a garden can help and, with recent ornithological records revealing a worrying downward trend in the numbers of many bird species, the knowledge gained from the exercise is an important way to reveal the national picture. If you can, do it with your children and encourage them to help learn about and save wildlife. You can sign up and access all the detail here: https://tinyurl.com/bdex96f2.
You just need to decide on an hour between these dates and record all the birds that land during the chosen hour, then send the records to the RSPB.
Our recent observations have revealed a very sharp and worrying decline in many bird species in the garden. Robins, blackbirds, jackdaws, great tits, blue tits, nuthatches, wrens and wood pigeons (and mallard and moorhens on the pond) seem to be OK, but formerly common birds such house sparrows and many finches, starlings, thrushes, house martins and swallows have declined severely or totally disappeared.
These are national declines, it seems. The climate catastrophe, over-intensive agriculture, habitat loss, over-development, “garden grabbing” and pollution (see my reports about the state of our waterways!) seem to be the main culprits but the more data we can collect, the more analysis of those data can help find exact causes and, hopefully, remedies.
Betts Ecology spend a lot of time and effort providing and servicing nest boxes, ensuring we develop and maintain good bird habitat and recording ornithological sightings. Everyone can help by joining, for example, the RSPB (www.rspb.org.uk/) or BTO (www.bto.org), or a local wildlife group.
