Garden Birdwatch 2000/2001 – UPDATE Issue 3 October 2000 to March 2001

Some of your more unusual sightings!
That's the beauty of birding, you just never know what will turn up, and that's particularly true in your garden as well as out and about! Over the recent months a number of interesting, unusual or downright rare birds have been observed by GBW participants. We occasionally get a 'phone call asking for help in identification (sometimes we get stumped!) though often the first we know about it is when the return sheets come in at the end of the period. If you think you have a rarity please feel free to get in touch at the time, we are always pleased to learn about them, and give advice about how to identify a 'strange' bird. So what have you been seeing? Throughout the winter a number of you were fortunate enough to see Waxwing. This colourful and, sometimes confiding, starling sized bird favours berries and soft fruit. A Black Redstart, observed in October 2000 at Groudle was almost certainly a recent arrival, being seen at a house near the coast. We have also been pleased with the number of records of Bullfinch from various parts of the Island, with the time of year most are observed suggesting spring and autumn migration of this, usually, fairly sedentary species.

Counting on your continued support
Many of you continue to enjoy taking note of the birds that visit your garden and most of you are still sending a regular quarterly return to us. These are proving to be tremendously useful and, a little later in this update we will show how the data you are gathering can now be compared with that gathered in a similar survey in the rest of the British Isles. Since we started in November 1999 we have however noticed a decline in the number of returns being sent to us. Feedback suggests that some of the reason for this is that people feel we will 'get bored' with hearing about the same species week after week. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is precisely that regular monitoring of numbers that is the key to the success of this type of survey. Our garden bird populations are an important and early indicator of the general state of health of our nation's birds and wider environment. The more consistently our data is gathered the more reliance can be placed on the results and the greater is our ability to identify changes in populations. So please do not be discouraged by the 'routine' nature of what you see, in many ways that is more important than the occasional rarity. We are trying to build up the numbers of participants, which as I said earlier, has decreased in the recent past. So if you know of someone who is interested in the birds in their garden why not ask them to get in touch with us and join our scheme. At only £5 per annum it offers great value for money and provides vital information on our local bird populations.

Comparing our results with those of the British Trust for Ornithology
The BTO have been running a Garden Birdwatch Scheme for a number of years and, to aid comparison of the results, we run our scheme in the same way. Comparative data is now available for a range of our more commonly recorded species and the following charts show the results for just a few. The data runs from the week commencing 26th December 1999 to week commencing 25th March 2001, with local data having a gap of five weeks, when our scheme wasn't running. Dotted lines represent UK data and the solid line shows our results.

Wren - Very similar trends between IOM and UK with peaks evident during the winter periods and less seen in the summer when the bird is perhaps more secretive.	Dunnock - A similar pattern, with definite increases here and in the UK during the winter months, but why are our numbers so low? Perhaps people are overlooking this secretive species.
Blackbird - A high level of attendance throughout the year. Notice the marked upturn in attendance during October, coinciding with known migration to the British Isles	Goldfinch - Always a popular visitor to our gardens, note the peak of attendance during the late March to April period. Our survey is showing that there is a migration of Goldfinch through the IOM at this time.

Thanks are due to the BTO for allowing us access to their data; in particular thanks to Andrew Cannon who runs the scheme. Over coming issues we will be highlighting further species, the data becoming more meaningful as time goes by and we can compare data year on year.

Caring for our garden birds
With the colder weather not far away birds will start to rely more heavily on our gardens for food. Remember to keep your feeders clean and to regularly clear debris from under them, to avoid birds picking up disease. If possible move feeders to different parts of the garden every so often, to avoid the area underneath becoming contaminated. Also, a note of caution about leaving water containers out! One of our participants has noticed three drowned birds in a bucket. To avoid this happening cover buckets up and make sure that water baths have shallow sides to ensure birds don't fall in.