Garden Bird No Show

I'm feeling very forlorn about today's blip. Why a photo of an empty bird feeding station?

Well today we decided, for the first time, to take part in the RSPB annual bird watch. I made sure the bird feeders were fully loaded, I set the camera up on the tripod with my biggest lens. We had the binoculars at the ready. At 9AM we started our one hour watch.

If the RSPB had scheduled this for just about any other day in the last two weeks we would surely have counted at least seven blackbirds, at least eight goldfinches, several robins, blue tits, great tits, and probably a few rarer birds.

So when after ten minutes we had counted just six birds we were a little downcast. It turned out that was the busy period. For the next 50 minutes not a single bird landed in the garden.

The RSPB is now in possession of some data which I feel is totally unrepresentative of the bird population in our garden. They insist such data is still useful, and that it all averages out over a large data sample. I'm not convinced.

Of course late this afternoon the usual horde of goldfinches descended on the garden and I was all for ditching our earlier sample and doing it again, but G wouldn't hear of it :-)