The Big Garden Birdwatch 2022

The teddy bears had great fun today. If you remember, they were taking part in the Big Garden BirdWatch to see how many different birds they saw in their garden in one hour over the weekend of 28th to 30th January.

They chose to do their counting between 8 o'clock and 9 o'clock on Friday morning, just in case the weather was bad during the rest of the weekend and the birds wouldn't be visiting. It meant an early start for the bears as they obviously had to have breakfast before they could settle down to do any counting.

They were initially a bit worried, because it was quite a cloudy day, and they didn't want it to rain and keep the birds away. But they were very lucky and the sun shone part of the time, and it didn't rain at all!

They had all decided on a particular bird to count, and they were all very busy noting down how many they saw, so that they could pass their final figures to Teddy, who was going to fill in the official form to send back to the RSPB - that's the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Suddenly - great excitement! A big bunch of long-tailed tits suddenly appeared - it looked like a huge family gathering! The bears couldn't remember having seen them for a very long time, so were very pleased to see them back in the garden!

They have extremely long tails, and they seem to like travelling around together because the bears saw about ten of them, all at once. Long-tailed tits also seem to do a lot of chattering between themselves - they can be quite noisy when they all get together - possibly even noisier than all of the bears!

Then a bird appeared that none of the bears could recognise. It was greyish in colour, with a very black head, and probably just a bit bigger than a sparrow.

Tommy said it was a coal tit but it wasn't colourful enough, and it was too big. So they rushed to their bird books to try and find out what it was. It turned out to be a blackcap - quite a good name actually for a bird with a very black head! The book said that it was normally a summer visitor but some birds stayed over the winter in Britain. This must have been one of them. It was certainly a bird the bears didn't expect to see.

And then they saw a bird they had never seen in their garden before. He was quite colourful too. They rushed for their bird books again and eventually discovered that it was a green woodpecker! Wow! They had never seen one of those before. He didn't stay very long so they don't know if they will see him again, but they will certainly look out for him now that they can recognise him.

At nine o'clock they handed over their counting sheets to Teddy to fill in the RSPB form. They were enjoying themselves so much that they stayed watching the birds in the garden for a long while after their hour was up! It maybe helped a little bit that they still had lots of snacks and drinks to finish too!

They're going to have to go out and fill up all the bird feeders again now but they hope you had as much fun counting the birds as they did. They're all looking forward to doing the BirdWatch again next year too!