Changes in birds and people recorded by Big Garden Birdwatch 1979-2009

 

The table shows the average number of the top 15 species of birds recorded per garden across the UK in the 1979 Big Garden Birdwatch, and compares this with the results from the 2008 survey.

 

	Average per garden in 1979	Position in 1979	Average per garden in 2009	Position in 2009	% change
house sparrow	10	2	3.7	1	-64
starling	15	1	3.2	2	-77
blackbird	4.0	3	2.8	3	-30
blue tit	2.4	5	2.5	4	-4.2
chaffinch	3.0	4	2.0	5	-33
wood pigeon	0.2	15	1.9	6	850
collared dove	0.3	14	1.4	7	367
great tit	0.9	8	1.4	8	56
robin	2.0	6	1.4	9	-30
long-tailed tit	N/A	N/A	0.3	10	N/A
goldfinch	N/A	N/A	1.3	11	N/A
greenfinch	1.0	7	1.0	12	0
dunnock	0.8	9	1.0	13	25
magpie	0.4	12	0.9	14	125
coal tit	0.2	16	0.8	15	300

 

The Winners:

 

Woodpigeons and collared doves continue to be the two biggest winners. They have stormed our gardens with massive number increases and can now be seen in over half of our gardens.

 

The tit family has proven themselves to have the greatest staying power. Blue, great, coal and long-tailed tits have all staked their claim in the Big Garden Birdwatch top 15 with regular appearances, year on year. In 2009 the long-tailed tit made it into the top 10 for the first time in 30 years.

 

 

The Losers:

House sparrows and starlings continue to be the biggest losers by far. Despite battling with each other to be top of the Big Garden Birdwatch table for the past 30 years, we’re still seeing fewer of them in our gardens.

 

You might be asking how they can be doing so badly if they’re the most common birds in gardens? It’s simple really, we still see more of them in our gardens than other birds but house sparrows and starlings are really sociable…They like to hang out in big groups and 30 years ago we would have seen 10 sparrows and 15 starlings in a garden, these days you’d be lucky to see more than three or four. That’s a problem.

 

Count yourself lucky if you see a song thrush in your garden. They were really common in 1979, but have plummeted down the Big Garden Birdwatch rankings in recent years. They dropped out of the top 20 for the first time in 2005 and in 2009 were relegated to 21^st position. This reflects the massive declines that have been seen all across the UK.

 

Numbers of blackbirds, chaffinches and robins have also dropped significantly in the last 30 years.

 

 

The People:

Back in 1979, just over 30,000 children took part in the Big Garden Birdwatch… It was their secret and adults were forbidden from joining in the fun!

 

They did a great job of keeping it a secret, it wasn’t until 22 years later, in 2001, that a nice man at the RSPB (or Richard as we call him) decided that adults could join in the fun. From then the survey has gone from strength to strength.

 

The table below shows how the survey has grown since 2001.

 

Year	Total participation	Adults	Children
2001	48,500	36,000	12,500
2002	194,735	171,729	23,006
2003	248,878	212,851	36,027
2004	409,544	356,502	53,042
2005	361,255	296,505	64,750
2006	471,630	385,027	86,603
2007	408,501	327,517	80,984
2008	395,617	315,467	80,150
2009	541,269	420,733	120,536