Big garden bird watching

Christmas has gone. Its all over now. But, the only bird that everyone, barring the avid bird watcher, has been thinking about for the last month, is the rather cocky Turkey. Neither the turkey, nor the less popular christmas dinner guest, the goose, are common garden birds and both are rarely seen on an everyday bird watching trip in the countryside. Unless you are walking through a poultry farm, and who does that these days?

RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch

Well now it’s time to put away thoughts of these doomed birds and start to think about our amazing and beautiful native species. The RSPB’s Big Garden Bird Watch takes place on 26-28th January and its a chance for the human population to log their ornithological sightings. You can send off for your free Bird watching kit here and it comes with tips to carry out your survey efficiently.

At The Secret Campsite Lewes we will record sightings in and around the buildings. But it’s also fun, if the weather is amenable, to spend an hour in different parts of the site to see who is overwintering there.

At The Secret Campsite Lewes

The Secret Campsite Lewes bird box array

The usual suspects are always great to see and it reminds me why we work so hard to encourage a mixed and diverse set of habitats. By leaving different areas around the campsite uncut during the cold weather they provide a huge range of seeds and berries for our feathered friends to gorge on during the lean periods. In turn this offers us lots of potential to watch these native birds in their natural habitat. Many of these non migrants hang around during the summer when the fields are full of campers.

What could be better than sharing your holiday trip with a mob of Long tailed tits. Or having a Green Woodpecker cackle you awake in the morning. Not to mention the hoots of Tawny owls at night. A great way to escape the hustle and bustle of everyday life in a town.

Robin

Great Tit

The birds that we see out in the countryside are often different to those typically seen in and around towns and other more urban areas. These birds that you might have in your garden at home often flourish on the bird food put out by you and your neighbours. Now is the time to see who they are, aswell as how many of them you have in your garden space.

Make sure you send off for your pack and we’ll post a blog to let you know what we saw here over the weekend. Hopefully, some of them will still be here if you visit in the summer.

We hope to be recording some, or all of the following species:

House sparrows, Green woodpecker, Long tailed tits, Nuthatches, Robins, Kestrels, Buzzards, Blue tits, and Thrushes. If we’re lucky Fieldfares, who are winter visitors from Scandinavia, just like ABBA.