30-Minute Birder
No cheating now! Thirty-minute-birder Amanda Tuke hadn’t realised how competitive a garden bird-list might be – until she sounded out other birdwatchers on compiling one
Get the most out of short bursts of birding
Idon’t know what makes me look up from my laptop, but when I do the silhouette of the bird being mobbed by a crow is unmistakable. “Kite!” I screech and rush downstairs to tell my other half. He is in the middle of a video call and shushes in my direction as I gesture frantically at the back window. Feeling rather deflated, I return to my desk.
To satisfy my need to share the sighting with someone – anyone – I post it on social media, tagging in a birder who lives north-east from us.
“It’s flying your way”, I tell him. “Cool”, he replies with a little less excitement than I was hoping for; but perhaps I’m reading too much into one word. Later he messages, in a somewhat off-hand way, that he regularly sees them flying north across London towards Epping Forest. However, I am at least reassured I didn’t imagine the Red Kite and add it cheerfully to my growing garden bird-list.
I’ve always been an obsessive list maker – it’s a way of convincing myself that there’s order in my life – so, it was only a matter of time before it spilled over into birding. This spring, I finally sat down with a coffee and thought back through every bird species we’d ever seen in our five-by-six-metre suburban back garden, since we moved in 17 years ago.
Garden highlights
It might be a small space, and in suburban south London, but we’re very close to a patch of ancient woodland, so the list is pleasingly well-rounded. As well as the pair of confused Mallards that waddled in one morning, highlights include regular visits from Nuthatches and Great Spotted Woodpeckers, and the flock of gorgeous Lesser Redpolls which made the soil ripple beneath the bird feeder one morning.
“But hang on a moment. The kite wasn’t in your garden!” I hear you protest – and of course you’re right. One of the decisions I made when I started the list was to have it in two parts, one for ‘landers’ and the other for ‘flyovers’. The flyovers are more challenging, not only for taxing my identification skills but also ethically, as it includes birds like Grey Herons which wouldn’t notice if our garden disappeared into a sinkhole.
Despite the ethical quandaries, listing my garden birds has a wonderful zen-like fatalism to it. I can put up a myriad of birdfeeders, dig a pond, and the birds will either come or they won’t. There’s no amount of energy expenditure which will add to the list, or so I naively thought.
“All serious birders who do garden bird-listing, record birds in, over and from their garden, either by sight or sound,” naturalist and author Stephen Moss tells me, “and that can include birds quite a long way away, if you have a powerful telescope.”
I ask whether he felt he’s ever cheated with his list. “A visiting friend heard a
Cuckoo while I was out of the house and that went straight onto the garden list,” he admits. He also confesses to having added a Kingfisher which he saw from the lane just outside his garden, but reckoned would have been visible from the garden.
Stephen reels off a list of birds he’s recorded and tells me his happiest garden sighting was a flyover Mediterranean Gull.
There’s clearly a bit of West Country garden bird-list rivalry between Stephen and Bird Watching stalwart and author Dominic Couzens, but they are both at pains to assure me it’s good natured. “Stephen is forever going on about his garden birds,” Dominic tells me. “I’m only 10 species behind him now and I can sense some real fear I’m going to overtake. I’ve added Merlin recently and already have Little, Cattle and Great White Egrets on the list.”
I ask Dominic what he thinks about Stephen’s Kingfisher. “Definitely cheating!” he says firmly. Guys, are you quite sure this is good natured?
Whatever rules I decide to use, I’ll need to warn the neighbours that I’ll be spending time looking out of the back window with binoculars or even recruit them to help. I’d hate them to think that I was inspecting their gardening when I’m just trying to add to my list. I wonder if all garden bird-listers are so concerned with propriety?
There’s a comedic if disturbing moment in 2011 feature film The Big Year when competitive and unscrupulous birder Kenny Bostick, played by Owen Wilson, hears of a rare hummingbird in a private garden. After racing across the country to the location, he vaults over a locked garden gate to snap a photo and is in and out to get his tick, without the elderly owner even clocking he’s been there.
Spotting a rare bird in our garden would be great for my list but could be a mixed blessing. We did once have to gently ask a young man walking past our garden to stop taking photos of birds on our bird feeders, given he was inadvertently pointing his camera directly at our bedroom window. That time it was just Blue Tits and Ring-necked Parakeets, so when I do finally see a Waxwing in the garden, I’ll be a little careful who I share that information with. Waking up to see our garden fence bristling with zoom lenses would be alarming.
Serious side to birding
When I ask about garden bird-listing on social media I hear lots of different ‘rules’ and some great sightings. My writer and naturalist mate Jane tells me that she and her husband share a list but even that hasn’t stopped it being competitive. “He’ll say he saw two Bullfinches on the feeder and I’ll try to trump that with seeing three, or even a couple of Treecreepers instead,” she says.
WAKING UP TO SEE OUR GARDEN FENCE BRISTLING WITH ZOOM LENSES WOULD BE ALARMING
There’s a more serious side to garden bird-listing of course, with some of us choosing to commit to regular recording, which produces important data. There are about 20,000 gardens currently registered for the British Trust for Ornithology’s Garden BirdWatch, and owners of 250 of those 20,000 gardens have been sending in the weekly records since the survey started in 1995.
BTO asks for birds actually using the gardens, including for example House Martin feeding above and Sparrowhawk flying through, but a flock of Canada Geese simply passing high overhead wouldn’t count.
I admitted to Mike Toms, BTO’s head of communications, that I’d been tempted to take a very expansive view for my garden list. While my rules don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, I asked Mike whether ‘record gilding’ was an issue for the survey. “We ask participants to stick to the recording guidelines,” he said, “and applying them consistently from one week to the next means that the underlying trends in garden use for key garden visitors can be picked up.”
The survey team has learnt not to discount records simply because they seem unlikely. Eyebrow-raising garden records of a Hooded Vulture, Intermediate Egret and Temminck’s Tragopan were all ultimately verified by photographs and proved to be aviary escapes. Mike told me he hasn’t collated his weekly Garden BirdWatch count into an all-time garden list. “I’m not really a lister, unlike some of my colleagues who keep garden and patch lists, office window lists or even a ‘seen by bicycle’ list,” he says.
Right, I’m just off to revise my bird flight calls and practice my silhouette recognition skills, not to mention contacting all the bird-aware visitors who’ve ever stayed over in case they spotted something interesting while they were here. With a bit of application, I might be able to really make something of this garden list!