Big BORING Garden Bird Watch

As usual, the RSPB chose the dead week of the year for this event. I've been up since dawn filling the feeders and covering four bird tables with seeds and fat. Two weeks ago the place was alive with every kind of bird, and that included 13 fieldfares and 11 male blackbirds fighting it out under the apple tree and my usual variety of finches, tits, wrens and house sparrows. And, indeed, before the fieldfares flocked in, there was that same solitary one that I started this blog with two years ago. That means he is now four years old.

This place is normally bird heaven. Normally I have to chase away the starlings, magpies and woodpigeons so that the little birds can have a go.

There is a certain week every February when the birds just throng in: throngs of greenfinches, tits, chaffinches, robins, the lot, so that the hedge is a living tapestry of colour and I can't tear myself away from the windows. I have recorded 52 species of birds here over the years.

At some point last summer the first ever coal tit arrived (because I planted some fir trees, I think), and can often watch water hens and herons in the field. I have a beautiful song thrush or two bouncing up the garden most mornings.

So far today, 4o minutes in (I've more or less given up) I've had one rook and one blackbird. There are some vague large shapes of a magpie and two fat pigeons in the tree in the field, but no one is hungry, despite the hard frost and the frozen water butt. And it was just the same last year. The RSPB say don't worry about it; it means that the birds are being recorded elsewhere. But I wish they would chose a week in February instead.

I have been longing for a tree sparrow (passer montanus) since I came here, but, even though there are some in Wiltshire, I am not to be rewarded.