Big Garden Birdwatch Results 2018

Big Garden Birdwatch - a Kingsbury garden perspective

Guest post from a Kingsbury resident
 

If, like me, you are lucky enough to have a garden, one of the pleasures of life is to watch the birds that come to enjoy it with you. Next weekend, Saturday 27^th and Sunday 28^th January, sees the RSPB’s annual Big Garden Birdwatch LINK . On a good year, I can see 8 to 10 different species of birds in my garden in the course of an hour, but if the weather is bad, perhaps only 3 or 4. 

There are some birds which we only see a few times each year. Our garden backs on to the Jubilee Line, and most of our occasional visitors fly in from the railway bank. I suspect that many of them live in Fryent Country Park, which shows the great value of this local nature reserve, and of the wildlife corridors which link it to gardens in the residential areas of Brent.

Yesterday our garden was visited by a Green Woodpecker, which stayed for over 15 minutes and allowed me to take some photographs. I have put three of these together, to illustrate its interesting feeding behaviour:

Although it nests in holes in trees, the Green Woodpecker uses its long beak mainly for eating its favourite food, ants. It can sense where there is an ants’ nest under the ground, then pecks to make a funnel-shaped hole directly above the nest. It seems to know that the ants prefer a site beside our garden path, so that they can easily excavate safe chambers for their eggs out of the sand that the paving blocks rest on. 

Once it has made the hole, the woodpecker puts its beak down, and flicks out its tongue to gather ants. Then it throws back its head, while pulling in its tongue, so that the ants go straight into its throat. It does this a few times, then hops a short distance before making another hole, or looking for another nest to harvest.

It will often be two or three months before we see a Green Woodpecker in our garden again, so the chances are that it will not appear in our Big Garden Birdwatch results. The bird seems to know that it must give the ants’ nests it has raided time to recover before visiting them again, a sensible and sustainable approach to managing its food resources. As well as being a beautiful bird, this woodpecker certainly has “Green” credentials!

Contrary birds and squatting squirrels in the Big Garden Birdwatch

I settled down for the Big Garden Birdwatch yesterday with pen and paper and a cup of coffee and achieved meagre results on a wet and windy grey morning. When I tried again later in the day a grey squirrel decided it had squatter's rights on the feeder and kept most birds away,  apart from a brave pair of great spotted woodpeckers.

I have up.

But today, while writing at my computer,  in a short space of about 15 minutes (rather than yesterday's hour) I glimpsed  8 long-tailed tits, loads of great tits and blue, tits,  a pair of nuthatches, robin, dunnock, blackbird, magpie, great spotted woodpecker, wood pigeon and jay.

You can blame them for any typos on today's posts.

There's a lesson to be learnt here...

Big Garden Birdwatch

More of a jungle than a garden - but nature friendly

The Big Garden Birdwatch in Wembley

My back garden

The RSPB's  annual 'Big Garden Birdwatch' is always an opportunity to sit in a comfortable armchair, cup of coffee at hand, to do almost nothing for an hour.

I have a tiny garden but it is designed to be nature friendly and is regularly visited by birds, However, the annual observation period is subject to interference from some unwelcome visitors. A pair of pigeons will perch on the seed feeder bracket for hours. They are unable to reach the feeders themselves but their bulky presence puts off smaller birds. They peer dimly at the  blue tits who bravely flit back and forth to the feeders but don't seem to have worked out that this is not time well spent!

They are the bird equivalent of dog in a manger.

There is also a neighbour's black cat that positions itself below the feeder and mews plaintively at the clinging birds, apparently in an effort to persuade them to plummet into its open mouth.

This morning the pigeons kept away and it was too wet for the cat, but a pair of raucous magpies made up for them and kept scaring off the other birds.

Nevertheless these were my results for the period between 10 and 11am:

Blue tit (5)
Great tit (4)
Nuthatch (2)
Dunnock (2)
Magpie (2)
Great spotted woodpecker (1)
Robin (1)
Blackcap (1)
Wood pigeon (1)
Jay (1)
Blackbird (1)

Each bird is counted only once  so when there is more than one they have to be in the garden at the same time - not the total seen over the hour as many of these will be returnees. Long tailed tits, a frequent visitor in groups of six or more, are missing. They usually visit mid-afternoon. I also see chaffinches and goldfinches but have not seen green finches for a couple of years after they were hit by disease.

The pair of nuthatches are regular visitors. They frighten off the blue tits and great its before feeding. This footage taken from my window shows a nuthatch's beauty and versaitility:

Some prickly characters seen in Wembley

I was cheered up on seeing these hedgehogs late last night on my way back from the Wembley Green Man. They were on the lawns in front of the flats on King's Drive, opposite the former Town Hall Library.

It is estimated that the population of hedgehogs in the UK has declined from an estimated 36 million to just 1 million affected by loss of habitat and increased traffic fatalities.


Readers of the BBC Wildlife magazine recently voted for the hedgehog to be the nation's wildlife symbol which the Green Party welcomed as appropriate as it represents the threat faced by many species.

Caroline Lucas will be leading a session at our forthcoming conference on the RSPB State of Nature report LINK

RSPB OBJECT TO WELSH HARP PLANNING APPLICATION

The RSPB have submitted an objection to the application for outline planning permission for 71 dwellings on the Greenhouse Garden Centre at the Welsh Harp.

The RSPB call for an Environmental Impact Study (EIA) by virtue of the fact that the development is to be carried out in a sensitive area as defined by the Town and Country Planning Regulations 1999.

They consider that the applicant's document, 'Assessment of Implications on Welsh Harp/Brent Reservoir SSSI and SMINC' has failed to consider the potential impacts on  interest features of the SSSI. They say the document presents no evidence quantifying existing levels of recreational pressure or whether there is capacity at the site for additional recreational activity. They say the document gives no detail on the type, scale and timing of mitigation and that therefore the efficacy of mitigation cannot be assessed.

The RSPB conclude they would like to see all their concerns addressed through an EIA and 'pending the outcome of further assessment work and the review of potential mitigation, the RSPB objects to this planning application'.

The full  RSPB response is available HERE