Hello all. At last I'm back on line. Phew, that was an illness and a half and I only really began to feel like a human being again a couple of days ago. I know a few of you have had flu and infections too over Christmas so you have my sympathies, and hope you are on the mend. Bring on the warm spring days.
A big thank you to those of you who took the time to do a bit of garden watching over the Christmas period. In the end even though I wasn't really with it, I managed 5 species, mainly house sparrow, starling, blue tit, dunnock and magpie. There may have been other species out there but I just didn't fancy sitting in the cold conservatory watching them.
This was all meant to be a bit of fun, but I shall make special mention to ST who managed a fabulous 27 species in his garden. By a long chalk ST is the winner of the competition. Well done.
But the competition was fun and just a way of getting through the dark days of winter, thus here are the equally credible entries in no particular order;
Caroline at Ragged Robin notched up a very credible 19 and also made mention of wrens roosting in old hanging baskets. Given the cold weather it would be interesting to know how many wrens in each basket each night.
Shirl at Shirl's Gardenwatch managed 12 species on Christmas Day and 18 in total, including brambling which is a nice garden tick. Sadly like many she recorded no greenfinches, sadly in a downward population dive. Outside the time frame she also had a reed bunting.
Frank the Early Birder, had a very good species count of 19, including the exotic ring necked parakeet and bucking the trend 12 greenfinches. Hold onto those Frank.
Sian way up in the Orkneys on her Small Island blog had 13 garden birds, but I think we'd all be so excited to include fulmar and hooded crow. As she said she only has one shrubby tree in her garden so not much cover.
Sadly Cindy at Cindy's Snaps sent me her list but I unfortunately never received it. If i get it after posting this I'll amend this post. Thankfully Cindy has now put through her score, a goodly 16, including a black headed gull with a taste for garlic bread. It all happens in Suffolk
It was great to have you posting your results especially given the weather across the UK, it wasn't the best of birding conditions. But thank you.
Finally some of you who left post comments to the original posting but never submitted your bird count also should have mention. I'm not sure if you took part of not. But that doesn't matter, we're all a big friendly blogging community out there so its good to promote each others work, so thank you for your comments to......
Chris from Notes from a Somerset Garden
A Happy New Year to you all!
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