Big Garden Birdwatch

The weekend of 29th and 30th January is the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch. The simple concept of spending one hour watching the birds in the garden and recording the highest number of each bird at any one time has become the world's biggest wildlife survey. Helping to provide a snapshot of the health of the UK's bird populations and to see positive and negative population trends.
For fans of twitter it has it's own hash tag #BGBW and the results will be available in May.
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Our garden survey was undertaken between 3pm and 4pm on Saturday 29th:
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Starlings: 10
Starling have previously featured in this blog back in October and were probably attracted to the dried meal worms and the pond as a source of drinking water.
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One of the things that the Big Garden Birdwatch has demonstrated is the number of starlings recorded in our gardens has declined by 75% since 1985: http://www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch/results/trends.aspx
South Abingdon seems to have a healthy starling population, somewhat helped by the nesting opportunities presented by roofs of the houses.
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Goldfinches: 4
A disappointing number of goldfinches, they often appear in charms (collective name for goldfinches) of between 10 and 20, but during this hour there were only four.
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Goldfinches have been a real success in recent years, possibly because of people who putting out nyger seed for them.  We stopped using this as it was often ignored in favour of sunflower hearts - as seen above, with a goldfinch trying to intimidate a chaffinch, it failed and they shared the seeds.
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Chaffinch: 3 
There have been five chaffinches in the garden at any one time, but during the survey there were two males and one female:
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Chaffinches are traditionally ground feeders, so it's interesting to see that they've learnt to use a feeder.
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House Sparrow: 2
Like starlings, house sparrows have also suffered a huge decline in recent years (50%), also recorded by the big garden birdwatch: http://www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch/results/trends.aspx
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Sparrows also like the sunflower hearts and eat off the ground or off the feeders.
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Blue Tit: 2
Blue Tits aren't migrants, so it is good to see a pair has survived the harsh winter and hopefully they'll make use of the garden's nest box.
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Blackbird: 2
A male and female blackbird are often to be seen in the garden - either winter migrants yet to return to Scandinavia or maybe they are a residential pair returned from migrating to warmer climates in europe.  They have been digging for worms, eating crumbs dropped from the feeders and drinking from the pond:
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Blackbirds are very territorial and will chase not only smaller birds (blue tits and chaffinches) but also each other) although they do seem wary of the starlings. 
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Pied Wagtail: 1
A real surprise, I've never seen one in the garden before and it only stayed for enough time to get a quick snap.
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They are insectivorous and so it wouldn't have been interested in the sunflower hearts or meal worms, so maybe there are small flies over the lawn.
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Other birds that regularly frequent the garden, but not during the period of the survey, are collard doves, woodpigeons, dunnocks and greenfinches, but one bird that has been absent from our garden for the past couple of years is the robin.
Maybe this national survey will reveal if it is just ours, or if there has been a national decline in robin numbers.

Quiet day on the Ock

Following the snow and recent heavy rain the river was place on flood watch this week.  Now the water and the flood alerts have now receded leaving the river surrounding area with a somewhat drab and dank, but thankfully without the risk of homes being flooded:
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Not much of interest in the river and only a crow taking the opportunity of the now muddy meadow:
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And what appears to be an poorly rabbit adding to the general melancholic feel of the river in January:
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First Otter post of 2011

Now the snow has gone, the river has a somewhat melancholic feel to it - there are no water voles, the trees have lost their leaves and the day light does not last long enough.
But there are still things to keep an eye out for,  for example, this mudslide has lots of footprints - possibly somewhere a dog has decided to go for a swim..
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But a closer look shows it could provide access for a different animal, the circled footprint does not appear to be a dog:
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A closer look seems to show the animal has five toes and not four and the size indicates it could be another otter footprint - this bank being a place where it chooses to enter and leave the river:
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This latest find is an opportunity to update the Otter map with three new pins (in red), this footprint is marked as C.  Whilst B is the footprint I discuss in the post on footprints on 23rd December, and A is the footprint found near the allotments as mentioned by Chris in his response to this post (thanks Chris!!):
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View Otters 2010 in a larger map.

I have several new years resolutions for this blog and one of them is to get an photograph of an otter.  This is very ambitious and although I have 12 months to try I will be as surprised as anyone if I succeed. 
In order to be successful there are three techniques to consider:

1. Luck - All my sightings of animals on the Ock are just coincidental - I rarely go out to find something specific, instead I just see what I come across, so although unlikely, it is not impossible that if I spend enough time walking by the river in the evening or night I may come across an otter.  This is how I found a badger - another elusive mammal in 2009.

2. Sit and wait - The approach taken by professional photographers to identify a suitable site and wait in one spot for hours and hours.  There are two drawbacks to this, firstly I have a day job so I can't spend all night waiting for an otter and secondly I don't think I have the patience.
Another problem is the lack of light, with otters being nocturnal I may catch a glimpse of one but getting a picture would be harder.  Although a high ISO setting, a steady hand and the light pollution from Oxford might make a picture possible - but I do want to avoid using a flash.

3. Remote Cameras - Often seen on wildlife programmes and now getting cheaper, the best option would be to place a series of remote cameras along the river - allowing the river to monitored over several days and using Infra-Red it would solve the lack of light problem.
Although I would need to find a secure location, which would mean putting them on private land to the west of the A34.
With a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge and a great deal of effort, camera traps can provide incredible results: http://charliehamiltonjames.blogspot.com/2010/09/is-there-anything-you-dont-take-apart.html (although I don't intend to pictures inside a holt).