2021 Bird count

Our household showed no change, apart from the lodgers. The garden ones, that is. 

Every year, from April through to July, I count the adult starlings in my garden to find out what proportion have survived from last year. It’s part of a national research project run by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) to find what needs to be done to slow the decline of Europe’s starlings.  I do this by catching them in traps baited with mealworms. The birds are sexed, aged, measured and weighed - a sort of ‘well starling’ check at the clinic - their ring number recorded, and then sent on their way. Often to be caught again the next day because they can’t say no an easy mealworm. Anyone who likes graphs can see the results of the national study here: https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/ringing/surveys/ras/results

But it’s not just starlings I catch. It’s the breeding season and all our local birds are struggling to meet the demand for wriggly titbits to be shoved unceremoniously into the gapes of their squawking nestlings. Blackbirds, dunnocks and, especially robins are regularly caught too, so I’m able to carry out a kind of annual census of my other garden birds as well.

In the first ten days of April this year, I have already caught ten different robins. Garden robins are a problem to keep count of because they all look the same. Even in the breeding season you can only identify their sex if you have them in the hand - females shed breast feathers to help line the nest, and develop an area of skin engorged with blood vessels, called a brood patch, to help them incubate the eggs.  Blowing gently on the tummy, therefore, parts their feathers and reveals all.

We rarely see more than two or three robins at a time in the garden, so we naturally assume they are ‘our’ regular robins. They are very territorial, so that’s why we only usually see two at a time. But they aren’t always the same birds. In our case, the eight extra birds caught so far will be from neighbours’ gardens or local hedgerows, all prepared to make an undercover foray into another pair’s territory for the abundance of mealworms on offer.

Of the ten caught to date, eight already had rings so I know when they were first caught and, in some cases, when they were hatched. One of those, I can say with absolute certainty, is a male that will celebrate his eighth birthday this spring. I also know he has been re-trapped in my garden every year since he was hatched. So does that make him one of ‘our’ pair of robins? I don’t know, because the other seven (between two and five years old) have also been re-trapped in most years.

It does make him an old bird though. The longest lived robin (established from ringing records) is only a few months older. Around sixty percent of those hatched die in their first year, and life expectancy of those that survive is about two years. So he’s done extremely well.

I’m pretty confident that our(?) old fella won’t appear on the 2025 census, but fingers crossed he makes it to next spring. It’ll be a good reason to raise a glass if he does!