Big Garden Birdwatch is as much about raising awareness as collecting scientific results

LAST weekend was the RSPB’s annual Big Garden Birdwatch, an event which due to deadline dates is still in the future as I write. As usual I intend to participate and persuade my children to spend an hour watching and recording the birds in the back garden.

Big is the right word when describing this event as last year more than half a million people took part and counted over eight million birds.

The records were analysed and used to produce a list of the top ten birds seen in UK gardens. Regional lists were also compiled and published online and I challenge you to guess the top three birds recorded in North Yorkshire gardens before reading on.

In top place was the house sparrow (seen in 95 per cent of participant’s gardens), closely followed by blackbirds and then starlings with the long-tailed tit, my favourite garden bird coming in at 13th. More unusually people also recorded buzzards, red kite and even a ring-necked parakeet!

The advantage of the garden bird watch is that you can participate from your kitchen without even venturing outside but for the more adventurous there are many other wildlife recording schemes that use the public or knowledgeable amateurs to collect and record data.

Within Craven you can participate in surveys ranging from plants to breeding waders. The level of knowledge and commitment required varies from specialist butterfly recorders to families completing surveys about their local pond or garden bugs (check out the OPAL website for some great surveys that are aimed at families). Often the surveys offer guides or training, for example, I survey the plants found in a kilometre square near Carleton every year using a printed guide that is so clear that even my children can contribute.

If surveys are not your thing, the Wildlife Trusts are running a 30 Days Wild Challenge that asks you to do something wild every day during June, their website is full of great suggestions that encourage people of all ages to get out and appreciate their surroundings.

Many of these schemes such as the Wild Challenge and Garden Birdwatch are aimed as much at raising awareness and publicity as they are at collecting scientific results. In fact, my students often query how accurate a survey can be when the general public collect the results.

Validity can be an issue with many Citizen Science projects and knowledge even of garden birds cannot be assumed. I recently gave a class of adults pictures of the top ten birds only to find that one group managed to identify the robin with confidence but guessed at the remainder. Even those with more knowledge might recognise a sparrow but may not be aware that there is more than one type.

Does this lack of accuracy mean that the results collected are useless? No, in the case of the Garden Birdwatch, data has been collected since 1979 and this can give an accurate picture of trends over the last 37 years especially as we can assume that the inaccuracies are much the same every year.

One key trend highlighted by the RSPB results is the dramatic decline in starlings (yes I know that they are in the top 10 list) and song thrushes, both of which have shown a decline of around 80 per cent over this period. Can these changes be reversed? Maybe not, but one thing is certain many birds are becoming increasingly reliant on our gardens and with increasing urbanisation will continue to do so.

So what can you at home do? As a nation,the British Trust for Ornithology estimates that we spend a staggering £200 million a year on bird food and simple changes to seed mixes to include more sunflower and nyger seed have resulted in greater numbers of goldfinches visiting our gardens. There is no doubt that food and water can help species survive in a harsh winter but more importantly attracting birds to your garden can bring hours of pleasure.

Just two words of caution, firstly bird feeders and tables can spread disease between birds so it is important to clean the feeders when you refill them and secondly take care where you position your feeder. The blackbirds in my garden love the old apples I throw out but neighbouring cats also love the birds so I always place them in the centre of the lawn to avoid distress.

Back to the Big Garden Birdwatch, I was planning to spend Sunday sitting in the kitchen, pen and binoculars at the ready, hoping that this year something will land during the hour that I watch. I have often pondered why a garden that has resident blackbirds and wrens remains empty in the last weekend of January, my conclusion is that everybody else has put food out and they have chosen to dine elsewhere.

As I suspect that I will have little to record on the day I will share with you my top garden spot which was a sparrowhawk sitting on the compost heap. My Scottish aunt goes one better, her top bird table sight was a pine martin chasing a red squirrel – now that would be a rare vision in Yorkshire!