Early Bird Survey - 2005

A big thank you to everyone who submitted their observations to the survey.

Observers were asked to get into their observation position before "first light" (i.e. when it was light enough to be able to see the birds, usually about an hour before sunrise) on one morning between Saturday 17^th and Friday 23^rd December 2005 inclusive, and then record the order and time of arrival of individual species at their garden feeding stations.

A total of 36 submissions were received; 20 from Discussion Board members and the rest from visitors. Of these, 4 were invalid - for example, they were duplicate submissions or the arrival times of birds were after the finish time of the survey - leaving just 32 sets of observations.

Coverage

The regions (the Counties and Districts included within the Regions are detailed here) that provided the most submissions were East of England, North West England, South West England and Yorkshire and the Humber - each providing 4 sets of observations. Eire, Isle of Man, London, Northern Ireland, North West Scotland and Wales provided none.

Most of the gardens (68%) were in suburban areas with the remainder being more or less equally shared between urban and rural.

Habitat Definitions

• Urban - densely built-up areas and town centres with very few natural or near-natural bird feeding sites.
• Suburban - inhabited areas on the outside of built-up areas, near countryside or with large gardens, municipal parks or recreational areas.
• Rural - areas away from towns, with just a few scattered houses, farms or other isolated buildings.

Early Bird

Your observations show that the Blackbird is the first bird to arrive at feeding stations, arriving on average 5 minutes after the time at which you could first see your bird feeders ("first light"). The next two early birds are Robin (6 minutes) and Blue Tit (21 minutes).

Arrival Times

Nationally, the average time after first light that each species arrives at feeding stations is given in the table below.

Blackbird does not appear at the top of the list because they were later at arriving than, for example, Blue tits in gardens where they were not the first bird to arrive. If there had been more observations submitted then it is likely that the ranking of these averages would be the same as the early bird ranking.

Other species that were observed arriving at the feeding stations included: Bullfinch, Fieldfare, Goldcrest, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Herring Gull, Long-tailed Tit, Reed Bunting, Siskin, and a Wagtail species. The arrival times for these have not been included in the analyses because they were reported in only one garden.

Conclusions

Blackbird and Robin are the early birds, the same result as last year, and as the BTO commented last year "this result is perhaps not that unexpected, given that all three species are known to sing at night in areas where there are street lamps".

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who submitted their observations to the survey.