High level turbulence

Suddenly everyone has caught up after Christmas - and they all want their reports at once! So, every day has to involve some time at the computer - hard when the sun's shining!

We had been planning to go to Chris and Lizzy's for an early Chinese New year celebration, but belatedly they realised that they couldn't fit eight of us into their kitchen, so we offered to host instead. This required some hurried tidying and hoovering, as well as preparing our food for the feast. And we had to fit in our Big Garden Birdwatch.

It was a very blustery day and the number of birds seemed lower than usual - in the previous week we'd seen large groups of Blue Tits foraging (up to 20) and sizable flocks of Greenfinch and Goldfinch sitting in our pollard willow. Despite everything we recorded a fairly representative assemblage of birds from our west Peterborough garden, sixteen species, the star of which was the Sparrowhawk. I only made it out onto the patio briefly, but was clearly fairly turbulent in the upper atmosphere too!


Our final results were:
Blue Tit - 2
Greenfinch - 6
Feral Pigeon - 22
Dunnock - 2
Wood Pigeon - 2
Carrion Crow - 2
Chaffinch - 3
Great Tit - 1
Blackbird - 3
Magpie - 2
Black-headed Gull - 2 (the only members of a large flock that actually landed on the lawn to pick up food)
Jackdaw - 2
Sparrowhawk - 1 (briefly perched before zooming off)
Starling - 4
Robin - 2
Goldfinch - 1

Everyone arrived about half past six bearing vast quantities of home-cooked Chinese dishes. We'd all made far too much, but it was totally delicious! Lovely to have a joyful celebration at a time when it actually feels as though we're entering the New Year, with Snowdrops flowering in the garden, and the birds singing at dawn and dusk.