Bird watching

Sparrows

The second week of the July school holidays saw almost 3,000 New Zealanders from all over the country sitting quietly in their gardens or spying through windows for the second nationwide garden bird survey.

Anyone could take part and participants had to spend one hour watching birds in their home gardens, local parks or school grounds and record the highest number of individuals of each species seen at once.

Organiser Dr Eric Spurr from Landcare Research says the event fills several important roles.

“We want to encourage people to become interested in birds and the environment and we also want to look at trends in bird numbers over time. Likewise, we want to know if birds such as tui, bellbirds, kereru (wood pigeons), grey warblers and fantails are increasing or declining in our gardens and in our towns and cities.”

Last year a total of 2,064 survey forms were returned and in total 89 species were detected.

“The large number of species was surprising, but reflects the fact that home gardens range from truly urban to rural and seaside,” says Dr Spurr.

Of our native species, the silvereye was the species recorded in greatest numbers during the survey in 2007 with an average of 10.2 per garden while the fantail was the 9th most abundant species (0.86 per garden), the tui was 11th, bellbird 15th, kereru 18th, and grey warbler 21st.

Analysis of the first 1,700 of this year’s garden bird survey returns shows some differences from 2007. These differences include a slight drop in silvereye numbers to 9.0 per garden this year. This is consistent with comments from several participants that silvereye numbers seemed to be lower. However, following announcement of this in the news media, a number of people contacted Landcare Research saying they had lots of silvereyes at their place.

House sparrows were the most abundant birds in 2008 moving from the number two slot in 2007 to the number one slot.

Tui

Chaffinch, tui and dunnock appear to be more common, and greenfinch, song thrush and goldfinch less common. Tui moved from 11th place last year (0.67 per garden) to 6th this year (1.2 per garden).

Dr Spurr reports that people were very enthusiastic in their response to the survey. The teacher at one school said, “Once again the children thoroughly enjoyed taking part. Graphs of the results are already displayed in the classroom and we were able to compare this year’s findings with last year’s. There were interesting viewpoints in the discussions as to why the results were similar in some cases and quite different in others.”

Participant questions included asking how many cats they had. As well as giving numbers, some people added comments such as “our cat is too fat and old to catch anything”, and “the cat can’t catch birds because it has only three legs and one eye and stays inside mostly”.

Some people who don’t own cats use a variety of methods to dissuade neighbours’ cats from visiting. One respondent wrote, “I may buy some lion poo from the zoo to discourage them.”

An unusual bird recorded this year was the stitchbird. Until 2005, stitchbirds were confined to offshore islands. They were introduced into the predator-proof-fenced Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in 2005 and the Waitakere Ranges in 2007. One survey participant living about 2 km from the Waitakere Ranges has had a male stitchbird come and visit her garden for the last month.

As at the end of August about two-thirds of the returns have been entered into the computer, so the results could change slightly. Up-to-the-minute results are available online.

2008 preliminary Garden Bird Survey

Top 10 birds per garden

*Preliminary results after 1726 returns