It’s Not Just Grommet Watching Birds!

Aline writes: We figured Grommet spends so much time at the window, there must be something in it! So a few weeks ago we participated in the Big Garden BirdWatch. This event is put on by the RSPB (which I assume stands for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), and 2006 is the 26th year it has been held. The instructions were simple: on either January 28th or 29th you spend one hour observing and recording the most number of birds of each type you see at one time (to prevent double-counting). It was pretty cold, so we watched from our window with binoculars. My favorite newspaper, The Independent, ran a 4-page color section of the most common birds and how to recognize them, so that made our bird identification a lot easier. This is what we saw:

2 carrion crows
1 feral pigeon
1 wood pigeon
2 gulls
1 blackbird
2 wrens
10 magpies

The results will be announced next month; last year, over 400,000 people participated. The results helps them monitor what species are increasing and decreasing, especially because some European birds winter in England. It really made me more aware of what kinds of birds are in our garden – I can see why bird watching is so popular!