Friday was more than a bit breezy all day. Sunday promises to be wet all day so today (Sunny but with a cold breeze) looked the ideal time to observe and count the birds visiting my garden for an hour. The results were prettty much what I would have expected except the number of Starlings and House Sparrows was low as they spent much time in the nearby bushes and only made occasional raids on the feeders. One nice surprise was the Long Tailed Tits. I had spotted them a couple of days ago and lo and behold a few decided to visit during the count.
Final count results:
4 House Sparrows
3 Long Tailed Tits
3 Blackbirds
3 Wood Pigeons
2 Dunnocks
2 Blue Tits
2 Starlings
1 Great tit
1 Robin
1 Chaffinch
1 Collared Dove
One real surprise occurred at breakfast time when I saw a female Blackbird obviously collecting nesting material.
Unfortunately the RSPB will have to do without my results as their web site is useless. Tried to log in with my details which have worked for years but they weren't recognised and I have no patience with companies which chop and change and mess things up.
Writing of companies which mess things up. Read that Lincolnshire County Council computers were hit with ransomware during the week. A cool £1,000,000 asked for the compromised data to be unscrambled. All because someone appears to have been careless about taking care before clicking on an attachment in an email. Fortunately the attacking virus was noticed and the systems shut down before too much damage was done. They are not paying, hoping to clean the system and then restore from recent backups. It's taking a while as most of their services have been offline for several days.
Sunday: It is now stated that the demand made to LCC was only $500 not the £1M first reported. They hope to have most of their systems up and running again tomorrow, Monday.
Until I read this John I had completely forgotten it was bird count weekend.
ReplyDeleteI belong RSPB but have had no communication about it this year. I shall not have time to do it today as we are going out shortly. Shame really but I have done it for the past ten years.
Pity also because looking out of the window yesterday I saw a wren, a greated spotted woodpecker and a couple of long tailed tits without bothering.
Weaver: I haven't heard from the RSPB for ages. I only found out about it on the BBC and social media sites.
DeleteI suspect the RSPB has started to outlive it's purpose. It seems far too close to the hunting, shooting, fishing set. Replacing Royal with National would be a step in the right direction.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've had a RSPB magazine this year although I did get new membership cards. Have just done the garden birdwatch here although its not as much fun now the children are grown up and I do it on my own! I haven't tried to enter my data yet - I usually leave it for a few days in case zillions of others are trying to get on there and it causes problems. They do annoy me though the way they phone to try and get you to pay more membership - its expensive enough as it is and the only RSPB reserve round here is open to all members or not.
ReplyDeleteI managed to get my birdwatch stats uploaded but have failed in earlier years. I think they emailed the details about the BGBW. If youre retired then the RSPB will reduce your membership subs, but they dont publicise this.
ReplyDelete