Big Garden Birdwatch : 26 January 2014

Big Garden Birdwatch : 26 January 2014

It seems a long time since you could sit down and make a good list of birds in your garden during a sixty minute period. Last year was a total blank and this year was not a lot better though we did get a couple of nice ticks. We have been on holiday so have not being doing much garden observing of late so it is hard to say of the male Blackcap we saw has been around for a while or whether it was a brief visitor. We also got a Wren which was nice but, other than that, it was a pair of Blackbirds, a pair of Great Tits, A Blue Tit and a Woodpigeon. That was our lot. We did see a Redwing and some Goldfinches from our window but not in our garden.

There was a time when we would expect to see around twenty Goldfinches in our garden at this time of year but not lately. Although there has been a lot of rain it has not been consistently cold over a prolonged period and I get the impression that there is still a lot of food out in the woods and fields so birds are not driver to gardens yet. At least I hope that that is the case and not high mortality during last year. The seasons are very mixed up at the moment and it is hard to predict when to expect certain birds to appear. We had this problem with the birding group last year where we seemed to get our timings all wrong.