Travel To Your Garden For A Green Adventure This January!
Can you tell the difference between a blackbird and a robin?
If you can - and you aren’t doing anything much at the end of January, why not step out into your garden and watch the birds? The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (the RSPB) are running their annual bird count on the 30th and 31st of the month - and your would really be helping if you joined in.
The Count:
Don’t worry about learning every single garden bird - they just want the common species.
And, they only want you to count the most you see at one time rather than clocking up every single bird that flutters past your garden. So basically if you see one blue tit - you mark down 1. If that one flies off and later you see another blue tit - it still counts as only 1. So you don’t need to add them together.
However, if 2 blue tits fly in together, then your count goes up to 2, as you only every count the total number of each bird seen at one time.
A quick read of their website will help explain the ‘rules’ which couldn’t be simpler - and you could be helping to make sure that they can monitor the rise of decline of some of the UK’s garden favourites.
House sparrows were top of the table in 2009, with starlings and blackbirds coming next. Do you often see them in your garden anyway?
Why Count Them?
Counting birds in your own country is just as important as counting birds in the Amazon or in the jungles of Borneo. Just because they aren’t a tropical species, or live in areas of mass deforestation - it doesn’t mean that they aren’t important.
Losing species close to home can also be an indicator of changing climate, habitats in danger and the effects of mankind - probably more important to you than those birds on the other side of the world - and you don’t need and international flight to keep an eye on these ones!
Joining the RSPB could make even more of a difference, but you don’t have to go that far if you don’t want to - just going into your own garden is far enough!
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