The RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch was on this weekend, from the 29th to the 31st. You record the number of different bird species you see in your garden at any one time for the period of one hour, and then you send in your results to the RSPB so they can monitor bird populations and try to make inferences from trends and what people are seeing year after year. It's a pretty great program for citizen scientists to contribute to, and they have live Q&A sessions with experts on live YouTube feeds and Instagram posts of various kinds as well as live bird cams that you can watch. They had something new and different every day of the watch. Back in Alberta, they do bird counts, but there usually isn't nearly the public involvement as there is here. NatureLynx has come close with people being able to post all sorts of plants and animals and get them verified by experts, and sometimes the experts comment on your photos, but here they really seem to want to generate excitement about it all more than at home. Enough of a tangent. If you haven't got a yard (they call a whole yard a garden in the UK), you can go out to a park to watch for garden birds. I decided to go to St George's Square as I knew there are a lot of benches and few trees that are short enough for me to actually see birds. There are other parks nearby, but they all have trees that are much too tall and/or that don't really have anywhere adequate to sit near the trees, so I didn't want to be looking up at tall trees with my binoculars trying to figure out what the birds were silhouetted against the sky. St George's Square did not disappoint. I saw robins, blue tits, blackbirds--a leucistic one at that!--and a lifer for me, a great tit.
These sweet little creatures look quite a lot like our black-capped chickadees at home, except for the pinking buffy breast of the black-capped chickadees has more of a yellowy hue and a black line down the breastbone. I had seen one when I was last in England in 2017 and had photographed it, but I don't think I knew about any ID apps at that time, and I couldn't post to the Alberta Birds page since it wasn't in Alberta, so it had remained a mystery to me. I just knew it was a type of tit that in North America we call a chickadee. Anyway, there were all sorts of these little sweethearts flitting about. It was quite a lovely afternoon as the park was filled with singing and twittering birds, and it was a somewhat warm day for late January. I can't want to see more of these and get to hear them and ID them by sound.
Update 27/02/2022: Again, in my poor blog-upkeeping, I seem to have also failed to include updated photos of these little ones. The photos that I got during the Big Garden Birdwatch were a little obscured, but I was able to get a couple of clearer photos when we went to Winchester back in May 2021. The one pictured at the top is lovely adult, and the first photo in the album below is a young one. You can tell it is not fully matured because the corners of its beak are yellow and look stretchy--which they have to be. Remember how it looks when you see photos or videos of baby birds, how wide they open their mouths for their parents to feed them. So they are born with extra stretchy mouths for this reason, and then that eventually goes away as they mature. As for the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch, I signed up again this year but unfortunately came down with Covid and had to isolate. If I had my own backyard, I could have gone out, but since I don't, I was planning to go to the same park as last year, so obviously I couldn't go.
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