Hi Everyone – Brian Clews here, looking forward to another season of wonderful garden wildlife. One of the captivating forms this takes is the day-to-day activity of birds in and around us and we know many members participate in the annual weekend of the Big Garden Birdwatch sponsored by the RSPB. We were fortunate to be able to capture some of the data generated that weekend for 2021 and our findings can be downloaded (right).

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But we would like to let all members know that there is in fact also a weekly equivalent activity of the same kind we can all get involved with and enjoy. The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) run their own equivalent Garden Bird Watch but it is open from March onwards every year enabling participants to enter sightings for a whole week at a time. This can be for every week of the season if desired or more occasionally if preferred. But all the data received paints an increasingly accurate picture of what is happening to the nation’s garden birds. So we not only get to watch and enjoy what happens in our own little nature reserve, but can become ‘citizen scientists’ to help the national monitoring effort.

 

Wild Cookham was privileged to have the BTO ‘GBW’ organisers do a presentation to us on the scheme in February 2021 and you can catch up with their talk here.

We would love all our members to take part in this simple but important project so once you have decided to participate, go to https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/gbw and press the ‘Join GBW’ button to get started.

Finally, the BTO have very generously given us some 16,000 lines of data for all the GBW inputs for the SL6 area over the last 20 years. Once we have analysed this information, we will post another report for you to read.