Sunday, January 27, 2008

Stop the pigeon

Can't believe I haven't posted since October but that's another story.

This weekend the RSPB are asking people to take part in a survey of garden birds. The task is to count how many birds visit your garden in one hour. Obviously to count them you need to know what you are looking at - but as the daughter and sister of keen bird watchers I thought I had a better than average chance of doing some spotting.

Approaching this in the same way as any new venture, I thought I would start off with a shopping trip - so went to the local garden centre to stock up on bird food / seed stuff to attract loads of birds. I put this out in hanging feeder things, left it for an hour for the attracting part to start work and then sat down in the conservatory for the big count. Decided against the binoculars (garden only 10 feet long) and rare bird identifier book - could write down descriptions and search for identity later.

In the space of an hour I saw three birds - a black one, a robin and a pigeon...