Big Garden Birdwatch - Location 1 Day 1

I went down to Nuneaton, Warwickshire today for a couple of hours to visit my parents. The journey south from Yorkshire was fairly quiet, a single Buzzard and single Kestrel the only raptors noted. The highlight on the southbound journey was clearly the guy in the BMW doing 95+mph in the outside lane having a shave!

During the middle of the day I managed to fit in an hour of observing the garden - the same garden that got me really interested in logging birds when I was much younger. Much of the surrounding vegetation has changed a little and the birds that were once common are present in much lower numbers (which appears to be a national trend for species such as House Sparrow and Starling) with others appearing more numerous (e.g. Wood Pigeon - again surely mirroring a national trend).

In my hour of observation I recorded the following 18 species:

Robin x2
Dunnock x2
Wood Pigeon x6
Collared Dove x2
Greenfinch x4
House Sparrow x2
Blackbird x2
Blue Tit x4
Great Tit x4
Wren x1
Chaffinch x4
Long-tailed Tit x6
Redwing x3 (flyover)
Cormorant x1 (flyover)
Black-headed Gull x5 (flyover)
Common Gull x2 (flyover)
Carrion Crow x1 (flyover)
Starling x2 (flyover)


Wren © Andrew Walker 2011

I'm looking forward to spending an hour in my new garden in North Duffield tomorrow morning - hoping for something interesting to liven up the hour and I'm also hoping to get back into the Lower Derwent Valley - would be good to catch up with the Glaucous Gull that roosted on Wheldrake Ings.

I've also got a copy of the new book 'A Photographic Guide to Birds of China including Hong Kong' to review for Surfbirds.com so I will get on with reading through that too.