Feeding The Birds

For Christmas the teddy bears received lots of lovely presents. One of their favourites was a whole stack of bird feeders, birdseed and a feeding station.

They were so excited, they set it all up after their Christmas lunch. First, they pushed the pole of the feeding station into the ground so that it wouldn't fall over when all the feeders were attached to it - it took all of them to do the pushing!!

From each of the hooks they then hung the feeders which they had filled with an assortment of bird food to try and attract as many different birds as they could.

There was seed mixture for all the little birds to enjoy, niger seed for all the finches to eat, fat balls for the robins, and peanuts for all of them! Boo loves peanuts but the other bears wouldn't let him have any of them or else there wouldn't have been enough for the birds!

They had also received a chart showing pictures of garden birds, how big they were, what they liked to feed on, and where they liked to feed from. Some birds only eat food off the ground, while others will perch on a feeder hanging from a tree.

They spent the rest of the afternoon sitting inside with their chart, trying to work out which birds were visiting their garden.

There were bluetits and coaltits, greenfinches and sparrows, and even big birds like pigeons and starlings. They loved that a robin came to visit too!

On the weekend of 28th to 30th January, the bears are going to take part in the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch. They will spend an hour counting all the different birds which visit their garden and then log on to the RSPB's website and enter the details. The RSPB stands for the Royal Society For The Protection Of Birds, and they use the information they gather from across the country to check on whether there are more or less birds of different types now than previously.

This annual survey has been happening for over 40 years and over a million people (and teddy bears!) joined in last year and counted over 17 million birds! That's a lot of birds! The top three birds on the list last year were the house sparrow (for the 18th year running), the blue tit and the starling.

Last year the bears counted more goldfinches than anything else, but the goldfinch didn't even make it into the top ten! The bears think that they must have all the goldfinches in their garden and there aren't as many to count anywhere else!

You can take part too by logging on to www.rspb.org.uk/Birdwatch and you can request a free guide to help you work out what to do and how to report how many birds you count. Have fun!!