Rare bird visit provokes best headline ever
24 April 2008
For the first time in recorded history, two egrets have been seen on a Scottish loch. The large heron-like birds turned up on the RSPB's Loch of Strathbeg nature reserve at Crimond in Aberdeenshire, and may well have been blown over from their more natural home in the Netherlands.
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!
Special offer: £5 off garden bird supplies
01 April 2008
Just a quick 'heads up' to say that the birdfood website Garden Bird Supplies has a special offer on for the whole of April and May. If you spend more than £50 they'll knock off a fiver - and give you free postage and packing.
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.
Finches resist decline in garden bird numbers, says RSPB
26 March 2008
The RSPB has published the results of January's Big Garden Birdwatch, in which thousands of householders sent in data about visitors to their back gardens or local parks - and the news isn't good.
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
- House sparrow
- Starling
- Blackbird
- Blue tit
- Chaffinch
- Woodpigeon
- Collared dove
- Robin
- Great tit
- Goldfinch
- Green finch
- Dunnock
- Magpie
- Long-tailed tit
- Jackdaw
Gardening for wildlife with the RSPB
18 March 2008
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.
