RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch 2013 - Our 100th Post!

Firstly, please make a date in your diary or calendar for Sunday 27 January at 10.30. This is during the weekend of the annual RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch and we will once again be holding our own bird recording event - the 'garden' in this case being Hilly Fields. We will be based on top of the hill next to the cafe and will have a stall there with bird-orientated craft activities for children. The core of the event, however, will be bird surveying and you can either go round by yourselves or on a guided walk with one of us. We will provide illustrated checklists to assist. Please remember the two golden rules:

1. Only record the maximum number of species that you see at any one time (eg. if you see three Magpies in one location and three in another, that's three - not six!)

2. Don't count any birds passing overhead unless they touch down on Hilly Fields.

These are the RSPB's rules and are meant to avoid duplicate counting and distortion of data. Although some birds are territorial and don't budge much from their pitch, others zoom around all over the place. 

We will collate all the findings on our hi-tech blackboard (see below) and send the final tallies off to the RSPB. If you want to do a survey that weekend in your back garden, then it's a good idea to register beforehand. Details are here: http://www.rspb.org.uk/

Secondly, the Hilly Fields Birdwatch stats department tell me that this is our 100th post! The majority of those posts were written by Keith who started the blog back in 2008, so full credit to him. We are not experts or twitchers, but bird lovers and bird watchers. The blog is not written for "birders", but for anyone who appreciates Hilly Fields and the role that it plays as a 'green space' in supporting nature. Thank you for taking the trouble to read our humble offerings and thanks for the feedback you send in. Hopefully, we will see you on Sunday 27 January at 10.30.