Both are produced in partnership with the RSPB, organisers of the Big Garden Birdwatch, and the paper also thanks a number of birding websites and forums for their support, so the quality should be pretty good.

The guide is available in Saturday’s paper and profiles the 50 most common garden birds in order of frequency, using the RSPB’s own illustrations, as well as offering advice on what to feed birds and how to attract them to your garden.

The CD is available with the Sunday paper. Called Dawn Chorus, it features recordings of three different birds.

The charity has ramped up its publicity, using Facebook to supplement more traditional crowd-pullers such as press and TV advertising, and is confident of topping the half million people who took part last year.

“We’re anticipating that this will be the biggest one yet," say organisers. "Big Garden Birdwatch is a great way to get adults, children and families involved with enjoying nature in their very own back garden.”

Go here to register – all you need to do to take part is log the birds that visit your garden or local park over a one-hour period on either January 29th or 30th and report your finding back to the RSPB on the Big Garden Birdwatch website.

Registering on the Birdwatch site also entitles you to a 10 per cent discount on bird food, while anyone who goes a step further and actually joins the RSPB as an adult or family member by March 31st gets a free RSPB classic apex nest box.

All you need to do is spend an hour on either January 29 or 30 (that’s a Saturday or Sunday, helpfully) recording the types and numbers of birds that venture into your garden or local park, then enter the details on the RSPB website.

You can register here, and also download an ID sheet with useful identification pictures and boxes to tick as you count off the visitors. Good luck in spotting enough wrens to fill in all 24 boxes, though!

The Big Garden Birdwatch has been running for more than 30 years, and last year well over a quarter of a million locations were monitored by volunteers like you. (We wrote about our 2008 experience here.)

The combined results have helped demonstrate startling and dramatic falls in populations of species such as the house sparrow and starling – but have also provided the information necessary to begin the process of aiding their return.

Find out more and register here.

Up at the RSPB’s Salthome reserve, a wetland centre on Teeside, they were left with a puzzle on their hands when a local supermarket donated a consignment of leftover fruit that included some bananas.

Now, we all know that plenty of wild and garden bird species go crazy for berries and for fruits such as apples and pears – but bananas?

Assistant warden Toby Collett said: “We were lucky to receive lots of different fruits from Tesco, but it’s the bananas that have revealed some of the birds’ hidden cravings.

“Because blackbirds and blue tits prefer fruit like apples and pears, which they would find naturally, we had no idea what to do with the bananas.”

In the end, they decided to scatter them beside the reserve’s frozen ponds and await developments. And it turned out they didn’t have long to wait.

“Before we knew it, large groups of moorhens, ducks and geese had taken a real liking to the fruits – some of them were even squabbling over the empty skins,” said Mr Collett.

The experiment was such a success that now they’re offering a free hot drink to any local resident who brings them unwanted or past-sell-by-date bananas.

The RSPB has always advised putting kitchen scraps out for garden birds, as items such as fruit, mild grated cheese, porridge oats, cooked rice and pasta or potatoes all successfully supplement seed mixes.

But now it looks like we’ll all be taking bananas, not bread, down the park when we want to go feed the ducks.

The charity’s head of wildlife enquiries, Val Osborne, said: “Although bananas aren’t one of the traditional fruits fed to birds, they probably hit the spot quickly and help birds warm up soon after eating them.

“They will certainly be of more nutritional value than bread, which is more commonly fed to geese, ducks and swans.”

While they might not have the obvious appeal of a wren hopping through your hedgerow or a robin landing on your spade handle while you take a break on the allotment, there’s no denying that a flock of starlings in flight is an amazing thing.

So we were gripped by the recent Autumnwatch footage of starlings on Aberystwyth pier – and, judging from the reaction on Twitter as it was being broadcast, so was much of the rest of the country.

So, if you missed it, here from the BBC is the amazing footage of the flocks arriving and combining, and the reactions of Chris Packham and Kate Humble:

And it wouldn’t be Autumnwatch without a few hidden cameras tucked away, would it?

How has the RSPB chosen to commemorate this rare siting? With a press release and website post bearing the glorious headline “Egrets? We’ve got a few“.

Brilliant!

Just click here to visit the site, or click on the advert to the right.

Garden Bird Supplies aims to be a one-stop shop for everything you’ll need to feed birds in your garden, and also offers a selected range of organic gardening and wildlife products.

Your discount will automatically be applied at the checkout, so you don’t even need to mess about with discount codes. The offer expires on May 31 and cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer.

Bird numbers are at a five-year low, with the average number seen in each garden down by a fifth since 2004.

Only the various members of the finch family – particularly the goldfinch – and the song thrush have managed to buck the trend and increase numbers.

Goldfinches move into the top 10 most-seen birds for the first time, while siskins, redpolls and bramblings have also increased.

The RSPB’s Dr Andre Farrar, said: “It’s definitely been a good winter for finches. Our gardens can be very welcoming to them, especially those with nyjer seed provided and thistles and teasels left to grow which also provide food.

“We’re seeing numbers of goldfinches swell because our milder winters encourage them to stay here instead of going to southern Europe. The increase in bramblings, up by two thirds in the last five years, reflects the scarcity of beech seed known as ‘mast’ in northern Europe and Scandinavia – if the mast crop is poor in these countries, we see more of them here in our gardens.

“Along with siskin increases, numbers of redpolls seen in gardens have skyrocketed. Again this is probably due to supply of food; both birds feed on conifers and deciduous seeds, so the figures suggest that tree seed supplies have been poor this year and they’ve been forced into gardens to find food.”

The 80 per cent increase in song thrushes is probably down to last year’s warm, wet summer, which made it easier for them to find snails, slugs and earthworms to feed their young. The bad news is that the species has been on the decline for 30 years, and one year’s increase is only a small start towards reversing that trend.

As usual, sparrows topped the poll – though their numbers are still sharply declining. Starlings were the second most-often seen bird, and blackbirds overtook blue tits to come third.

And – unsurprisingly with 400,000 people on look-out – some unusual ‘garden’ birds were seen this year, including red kites, firecrests, hawfinchs, and little egrets.

Top 15

1. House sparrow
2. Starling
3. Blackbird
4. Blue tit
5. Chaffinch
6. Woodpigeon
7. Collared dove
8. Robin
9. Great tit
10. Goldfinch
11. Green finch
12. Dunnock
13. Magpie
14. Long-tailed tit
15. Jackdaw

Interested in learning more about attracting wildlife to your garden? Then you’ll love a new project launched by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

Following its Big Garden Birdwatch event in January it has set up a Homes for Wildlife campaign.

It says that if you own a garden, or even just a window box, you can take simple, practical steps that will benefit many of our most important birds, mammals and insects. The UK’s largest nature reserve is in your hands…

Sign up to the project (for which you don’t need to be a member) and you’ll get a personalised garden audit that tells you about the most important improvements you can make. There are straightforward factsheets that you can print out and keep and an advice list that will remind you of simple steps you can take to make your garden more wildlife-friendly.

To learn more about Homes for Wildlife, just click here. Or follow this link to learn more about RSPB membership.