Grim

Today was the last day of this year's RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch - one of the biggest citizen science projects on the planet, allegedly - and even though it was an absolutely grim morning and I had a mood on me to match, I decided that as an RSPB member I really ought to rouse myself and take part. All you have to do is commit an hour to being in one place - garden, park, shoreline, bird hide or wherever - and making a note of the bird species you see in the course of that period, along with the maximum number of birds of each species that you can count at any one time. It's hardly taxing, but this morning I needed several cups of coffee and quite a high intake of calorific snacks to see me through it.

Unsurprisingly, given the weather - 6°C, and light rain driving through on a 12mph easterly wind - I didn't achieve the kind of mid-teens species count that I expect to record for this project. In fact it took me half an hour to reach eight species, and though a couple more blew in over the next fifteen minutes it was only in the 60th minute that I reached eleven, when a hen pheasant strolled out of the secret garden and came to see if there was anything to eat under the bird feeders. My final count for 2025 was this:

Blackbird 2
Blue Tit 1
Dunnock 1
Feral Pigeon (these days listed by both the RSPB and the BTO as Rock Doves, which in my opinion makes them sound rather more special than they are) 4
Great Tit 3
Jackdaw 13 (yes, seriously)
Magpie 2
Pheasant 1
Robin 1
Stock Dove 1
Woodpigeon 4

I'm not going to lie - when the Jackdaw number hit 13, scouts having signalled to the rest of the family that there was ground food out on the lawn, I opened the back door and clapped my hands at them, so that the smaller songbirds wouldn't be completely put off my little garden buffet. The Jackdaws and Pigeons (various) all went up at the same time, with a great pretence of outrage, but none of them stayed away for long. 

The same wasn't true of the two Magpies that were hanging around the edges of the garden, looking for a chance to feed. Although they have a reputation for being vicious, Magpies are very nervous of people, and they seem to have preternaturally good eyesight, so just the fact that I was standing in the dark kitchen with a pair of binoculars was enough to keep them from landing anywhere near the house. This one was perched in a small cherry tree on the far side of the yard where we park our cars, which isn't directly overlooked by any windows, so I could only see, and photograph, it by leaning across the draining board and angling myself and the camera at quite an acute angle to the kitchen window - and yet the bird was very clearly watching me. I adore its expression, which speaks so clearly of the kind of morning it was, and the Magpie's extreme dissatisfaction with the result of its human/food, risk/benefit analysis.