RSPB Garden Birdwatch 2013

The RSPB Garden Birdwatch weekend 26-27 January is now done and dusted. As always there are some positives and negatives when analysing the results. The finch and sparrow bar chart above shows a major decline in Greenfinches over recent years, but Goldfinch numbers are holding up and House Sparrows reached a record high this year despite all the doom and gloom nationwide.

The chart above shows a worrying trend in the fall in numbers of Starlings (only 1 seen during the birdwatch). This does reflect the general decline nationwide.
The highlight this year for me was the apperance of a female Blackcap, and it does seem that these are becoming more common visitors to garden feeders during the winter. My daughter Jen had both a male and a female Blackcap visit her garden during the birdwatch. These birds are not our usual summer visitors, as they have long gone to warmer climes in the South Med or North Africa. They are actually winter visitors that migrate here from Central Europe and can only survive due to us feeding them tempting morsels. Come spring, they can nip back quickly to their breeding grounds before birds using more traditional migration routes and quickly set up the best territories for raising young.
The year by year tally showing number of birds and species is shown below:

          SPECIES TOTAL BIRDS

2001       12                  34
2002       11                  46
2003       6                    19
2004       13                  50
2005       13                  35
2006       10                  56
2007       10                  37
2008       7                    44
2009       11                  45
2010       18                  48
2011       13                  39
2012       10                  42
2013       9                    23

From the above, it can be seen that this year was the 2nd worst since I have started recording. This possibly could be due to the poor breeding season that our birds had last spring. On a more local note, another factor could be the number of trees that have been removed from the nearby gardens in the hope that they receive more sunshine. Birds no longer feel protected from predators as they did before. It will be very interesting to see the national trend and I'm already looking forward to 2014.
See twitter #bgbw