BTO | Wild South

I’ve been keeping records of the birds that come into my garden since 2010. By now, that’s quite a lot of data. Once a year I get round to entering it into a spreadsheet, and trying to analyse it a bit. But apart from a few posts on my blog, and my own personal interest, the data are not really achieving much. Now I’ve finally found a use for the data, as part of the British Trust for Ornithology’s Garden BirdWatch survey.

I found out about Garden BirdWatch (which is different from the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch that takes place in January each year) at an event organised by the local BTO representative. Members of the BTO, and people like me, who have taken part in previous surveys (Nestbox Challenge, in my case) were invited to hear about the different surveys the BTO run, and a fascinating talk by Ed Drewitt on Urban Peregrines. I’m not a proper ornithologist (mammals are more my thing), so I felt a bit like an imposter at the event, but the Garden BirdWatch does sound like it’s designed to take the sort of data I collect each week.

So, I signed up, and have now entered my data back to July last year. I haven’t worked out how to enter my earlier data yet, but I hope this can also be uploaded somehow. Once the data is on the website you can look at summaries of it, although I’m not sure if they go into the level of detail I try to when I analyse my data. But at least it’s now helping researchers to monitor the health of our bird populations.

House sparrows have been fairly regular visitors to our garden. We see them all year round, with an average number of 3 per observation day. But in the last few weeks the sparrow population in our garden seems to have exploded. Before September this year, the most we’ve seen at one time was 9. Now there are more than I can count (they keep moving!).

They’ve been hanging around our garden quite a bit, and getting through the bird seed faster than I’ve ever seen before. I’ve no idea why we have had the sudden increase. In previous years there hasn’t been a large increase in numbers around this time of year. Perhaps they’ve had a particularly good breeding year?

They’re not the most spectacular of birds, but it’s great to see so many of them, as their numbers have plummeted in recent years. In the 1970s there were around 12 million pairs in the UK. Now there are between 6-7 million pairs. The good news is, data from the British Trust for Ornithology suggests that the decline has stabilised. Now we just need to work out how to help them recover.

Earlier this year we installed a sparrow terrace (to try and tempt them away from our gutters as a nest site). The boxes weren’t used this year, but hopefully some of our new visitors will decide they’re a good nest spot for next year. I’ll let you know!

Have you noticed anything similar in your garden?