The Reluctant Rhossili Bird Blog – A Special Edition

If you know your Great Tit from your Blue Tit…

Many months ago (well 12 to be exact) the Lady of the Hwb suggested that I write a bird or environmental blog and that perhaps I use the upcoming RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch as a starter.  My regular and perspicacious readership will know that I ignored this advice and dilly-dallied long enough to have well and truly missed the BGB by the time I produced the first Reluctant Rhossili Bird Blog (RRBB).

The good news is that this year I am on the ball and ready to kick off 2024 with a special edition[i] of the Reluctant Rhossili Bird Blog announcing the launch of:

The RRBB Big Rhossili Garden Birdwatch

This exciting event will take place between Friday 26^th and Sunday 28^th January, during which you are invited to spend an hour watching (and recording) the birds in your garden.  The event is remarkably similar (identical, in fact) to the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch which by sheer coincidence takes place at the same time.  To take part all you need to do is register at the RSPB site, pick an hour in the designated weekend and then record the birds you see on the RSPB website and also (please!) by leaving a comment listing the same on this blog. 

The Rules

I have a friend (yes, really) who confessed last year that they found the Birdwatch difficult, which surprised me as the rules are quite simple and I was beginning to explain about the rules when she interrupted me to say “Yes, but, how do you tell the difference between a Blue Tit and a Great Tit?”  Well dear reader, one of the ways is TO LOOK IT UP ON A BIRD IDENTIFICATION SITE or in a book, or you could just remember that Great Tits, as the name suggests are BIGGER and also (amongst other plumage differences) have a slightly brighter yellow breast than Blue Tits, which in turn are conspicuously bluish and have a brighter yellow breast than Coal Tits, which, unlike Marsh Tits which have a black cap, have a white stripe at the back of what would otherwise be a black cap.  And Long-tailed Tits are just little balls of cotton wool with long tails attached.  Happy to have cleared that up for you Irene.

So, as I was saying, the rules are simple.  Get a cup of tea, set your timer for an hour and record the birds you see in the garden.  Only count birds that are actively using the garden – i.e. have landed in or are hunting over (e.g. Kestrel), not birds that just fly over – and when recording the total number of birds of a species only count the maximum seen at one time (even if you know, for example, because male and female plumages are different, that you saw 2 bullfinches, if you only saw one at a time you only count one).  If you use garden feeders make sure they are clean (see below) and full (a perk of signing up with the RSPB Birdwatch is you can get 15% off any bird feed orders at their shop).  

And for the RRBB Birdwatch there are just 2 additional rules: the garden must be in the Rhossili parish and your observations must be entered in a comment on this blog (or, if you prefer to remain anonymous, you can email your results to rhossilibirds@gmail.com). 

Be a part of the world’s largest garden wildlife survey (and one of the smallest!)

The RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch has been running for 45 years.  In 2023 over half a million people took part, counting an impressive 9.1 million birds.  Because the survey is repeated at more or less the same time each year it has been able to show distribution trends in certain species, such as Song Thrush which has suffered an 80% reduction since the first watch in 1979.

The RSPB publish the results of the Birdwatch each year giving a breakdown for the UK, for each country and also by county. 

The top 13 BGB species counts for the county of Swansea in 2023 are shown below – along with the species count for my garden:

My Garden BGB 2023			City and County of Swansea BGB 2023
Species	Count		Species	Mean	% of Gardens
Chaffinch	8		House Sparrow	7.65	81.6
Goldfinch	6		Starling	3.05	45.3
Blue Tit	5		Blue Tit	2.85	77
House Sparrow	5		Woodpigeon	1.79	71.1
Great Tit	3		Magpie	1.66	71.9
Woodpigeon	2		Blackbird	1.63	77.9
G.S. Woodpecker	2		Jackdaw	1.53	39.5
Nuthatch	2		Robin	1.51	88.7
Blackbird	1		Goldfinch	1.25	25.7
Coal tit	1		Great Tit	1.16	46.9
Marsh tit	1		Long-tailed Tit	1.15	29.6
Dunnock	1		Collared Dove	0.94	39.4
Robin	1		Dunnock	0.89	43.2

Unsurprisingly the RSPB don’t publish results at parish level, which is where our very own Rhossili BGB would be helpful!  For example, following their dramatic and continuing decline since 2005[i] (caused in part by a disease spread from garden bird feeders) I haven’t recorded a Greenfinch in the garden since 2017 whereas 20 years ago they were one of the commonest garden birds.  

Greenfinches were recorded in just 6.6% of Swansea gardens in the 2023 Big Garden Birdwatch.  It would be very interesting to see if other people get Greenfinches in their gardens and to see the variation in counts of all the different species across the parish.  Do you get Starlings or Jackdaws in your garden?  I don’t, but they are in the top 10 BGB recorded species in the county.  What is the commonest garden bird in the parish?  Does Pitton have more and ‘better’ birds than Middleton and Rhossili (probably, but only a rigorous scientific survey along the lines suggested will provide the answer!)¹?

So, if you know your Great Tit…

…from a Blue Tit,

please take part in the 2024 RRBB Rhossili Big Garden Birdwatch and be the first to post your observations in the Comments below (or email rhossilibirds@gmail.com)!

Francis Morgan

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[i] BTO data on the decline of Greenfinch in Wales:

The smoothed trend line shows how the number of birds has changed through time.  To make it easier to compare among species, this is expressed as an ‘index’, set to 100 in the penultimate year.  An easy way to interpret this is to say for every 100 birds present now, the trend line shows how many were present in a previous year.  The shaded area shows uncertainty around the trend line (based on 85% confidence limits) and values for individual years are shown as dots.

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[i] The next ‘proper’ edition of the RRBB will be looking at the areas in the parish that are designated for the protection of wildlife, what these designations mean and how successful the protections are in practice.