RSPB BGBW & BTO GBW

Last weekend I took part in the RSPB* Big Garden Birdwatch (BGBW), along with half a million other people.  I saw 19 species in my garden in one hour, compared with a recent average of 23 per week.  I have been submitting weekly counts of birds in my garden to the BTO* Garden BirdWatch (GBW) since 1995 so I thought it would be interesting to compare my own GBW recordings with the national results from the BTO GBW and the RSPB BGBW.

The data sets are obviously different and this makes them a bit difficult to compare. The data I can get on my garden from the BTO GBW website are total rankings for all four seasons over 23 years whereas their national data are for the first quarters of each year for 2003-2015.  And the RSPB numbers are for the (one hour) 2017 survey only.  All are presented as rankings.  The BTO results for my garden and for the UK as a whole are of presence rather than abundance.  In other words, the likelihood of seeing a species rather than the number of individuals present.  The RSPB results, on the other hand, are for total numbers of birds (I think) so are for abundance rather than prevalence.

My garden is a bit different from the average.  It is just about one acre and has dozens of large mature trees.  Despite being just inside the city boundary it is more rural than suburban and the numbers above reflect that.  Much as I would like more house sparrows, I am very happy that the great spotted woodpecker is my third most reliable garden visitor. My top nine birds were all present in more than 90% of weeks recorded.

As mentioned above, the RSPB numbers are collected in a one hour observation period once a year.  The strength of this survey is the huge number of participants.  I suspect many people would have chosen to record numbers in the first half of the morning as I did and this may introduce a bias.  I was surprised to see that sparrow and starling ranked so highly (1st and 2nd) until I realised they are counting numbers of birds rather than % of gardens.  (Obviously sparrows and starlings tend to go around in gangs, whereas woodpeckers and nuthatches usually go around in ones or twos.)  I am not sure this is the best way to present their findings.

The BTO GBW started in 1995 and has about 6600 participants, down from a peak of 12,500 a few years ago.  Its recorders are more committed (they provide the data and pay a subscription to fund data collection and analysis), and probably more expert.  It now has over 1200 weeks of recordings and so is very valuable for looking at long term trends.  It does also collect numbers of birds but ranks birds by the likelihood of being seen rather than total numbers.

My own BTO GBW numbers are only retrievable as totals for the 23 years but in that time a lot of things have changed. House sparrows have been absent from my garden since 1997 and tree sparrows only arrived in 2012.  Woodpigeons, woodpeckers and goldfinches are all more common than they used to be, while my rookery gradually got smaller and was then abandoned after the 2011 season (averaged over 23 years, rooks still rank 15th on my list).

Birds are under threat from habitat loss, climate change, industrial farming, etc so all data on bird populations are valuable.  Both the BTO and the RSPB run many different surveys, so these two are just two pieces of the jigsaw.

*  For non UK readers, RSPB = Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and BTO = British Trust for Ornithology.

Foxes' food fight

I had almost given up feeding the foxes by New Year as they seemed to be less interested in the peanuts.  Then we had some very cold nights and I saw them searching around for the food by the back door so I relented.  This time I was alerted by a huge commotion outside and when I looked out there were four foxes, two standing on their hind legs and scrapping like boxing hares and the other two lying down watching.  By the time I had grabbed a camera the fight was over and three foxes had moved away.  This one was calmly eating the peanuts but you can hear the others in the background on the video clip.  The photos are frame grabs from the video, recorded with ISO 12,800 and hand held with a 60W wall light as the only illumination - amazing.

The next night I was ready for them and I had a shorter lens on the camera.  I also had an outside microphone but I forgot to switch it on so this is the sound recorded from inside the house.  I am not sure if the fight the night before was over access to the food as this is also the mating season.  However, these two are scrapping over the food but I am sure they are a pair.  I think the one at the food first is probably the female but I can't be sure.

The foxes have a very leisurely way of eating peanuts, one at a time.  On average they eat about 8 a minute with lots of chewing.  I give them about 0.5kg which is around 1000 peanuts.  So non-stop it would take one fox about 2 hours, which is about right.  The first fox turns up before 6pm and usually all the food has gone before I go to bed.  If a fox picks up more than one peanut I know it is about to move off and is taking a mouthful with it.

Bird of the week - Firecrest

Here is a bird I have never seen before and it's a real beauty.  If I were a twitcher (U.S. chaser) it would be a tick on my list.  This firecrest has been in North Shields for at least a couple of weeks so I decided to go to see it.  It is very small, is very fast moving and was in a dark corner of a municipal shrubbery so the photos aren't great quality but I think they are worth seeing.

The firecrest is similar in size and shape to a goldcrest but is much rarer and more striking in appearance.  Most obviously it has bold black and white facial markings but there are other subtle differences which explain the differences in prey and hunting techniques between the two birds which can live side by side without direct competition. I think this one is a female as the male has a red stripe down the middle of the orange.

In the early years of the last century the firecrest was an irregular visitor to the south of England and it wasn't recorded as a breeding bird until the 1960s (in Hampshire).  Firecrests are now scarce resident breeders in the south of England but are only rare winter visitors up here.  The Northumberland & Tyneside Bird Club Atlas collected data for 2007-2011 and on average recorded one or two firecrests each winter so I feel privileged to have seen this one.  Our birds probably come from central Europe.  It is amazing that this 5g bird flies right across the North Sea to get here.

The firecrest is Regulus ignicapilla, meaning fire-haired kinglet.  It didn't feature in Thomas Bewick's A History of British Birds (1797) because it was then unknown in England.  It was painted by Archibald Thorburn nearly 100 years ago, along with a goldcrest (top left), a nuthatch, a wren, a dunnock, an Alpine accentor (I think) and a dipper.

You can watch a BTO video on identification of firecrest and goldcrest here.  And listen to Chris Watson's BBC Radio 4 Tweet of the Day here.

Gotta scratch that itch

Sons and mothers

The roe deer seem pretty relaxed at this time of year.  I wonder whether it's because they can see farther through the woods in winter, or because last summer's young are nearly full grown, or perhaps because the leaf litter means they can hear people coming from some way off.  Whatever the reason they just watch as you approach and at times they can't be bothered to get up.

All the does I have seen recently have had just one kid with them and they all seem to have been young males.  Males and females have different patterns to the white on their rumps.  In the female it is triangular (often described as an upside-down heart shape) with a white tuft (not a tail) and in the male it is kidney-shaped.  This is a doe

and this is a young male.

Another doe

and another male kid.

Here are mother and son.

There is a lot of evidence of the deer in the woods as well.  For some reason they don't like to lie on leaves so they make scrapes in the leaf litter.

Here you can see a print in the scrape.

Roe does usually have two kids in June, one male and one female.  I don't know if male youngsters stay with their mothers longer than the females but I haven't seen does with female kids in the past few weeks.

We are spending a lot of time, effort and money protecting our newly-planted trees in the reserve (you can see the tree guards in the background in the photo above) but the deer are pleasure to watch so we don't begrudge it.

Face to face with a killer

I was standing at the open window, photographing birds on the feeders, when this sparrowhawk landed less than 3m in front of me.  I heard its wings approaching but there were no alarm cells as the other birds scattered.  It is a female, noticeably bigger than the juvenile male which has been staking out the feeder in the kitchen garden, but also has juvenile plumage.  I had a 300mm prime lens (420mm equivalent) so I couldn't zoom out to get the whole bird in the frame and I got only these two shots.  I was hidden from view but she heard the click of the camera and was gone in a flash.

That in itself was worth knowing as I have been photographing the other bird through the double glazing.  I now know it won't be worth trying with the window open.  I'll just have to keep the glass clean.

It is interesting to compare the two birds.  Here they are side by side, the male on the left.  His photo was taken in deep shade, hers in sunshine.

Seven winter finches

I have had a few complaints - mainly from the small birds who turn up in the garden every day hoping to have their photos taken but who say they never feature on this blog.  They think there are far too many squirrel, badger and deer pictures and are completely unimpressed by all the sparrowhawk photos.  So here are some finch photos from this week.

The most numerous finch in the garden is the goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) with dozens visiting every day.

The most constant finch is the chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs), here almost all the time.

Also a regular visitor is the greenfinch (Chloris chloris).

And at this time of year I expect to see a pair of bullfinches (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) every day.

I don't usually take photos on the feeders but the last three birds are rarer winter visitors and feeder photos are all I could manage this week.  I saw a couple of lesser redpolls (Acanthis cabaret) in December but this week they have been regular visitors.  These are males.

The first siskins (Spinus spinus) of the winter came to the feeders last week.  This is a male.

And most exciting of all, a male brambling (Fringilla montifringilla), the first I have seen in the garden for two years.