Back the Big Garden Birdwatch

We want you to get involved with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ (RSPB) Big Garden Birdwatch from Saturday, January 28 until Monday, January 30.

We will provide spotter forms at our reception desk for you to pick up and take home with you to help with your birdwatching.

It is great that the RSPB do so much towards helping our bird population to survive and with the Big Garden Birdwatch campaign, which helps build a picture of garden wildlife across the UK. 

This year we’re encouraging you to get involved by supplying spotter forms, which you can pick up from our reception desk and then fill out and input the results into www.rspb.org.uk.

The bird population is a great indicator of the health of the countryside so it’s extremely important to take part in surveys like this. Birds keep the insect population manageable for most gardeners and the RSPB’s conservation work is crucial to help us understand how many birds we are attracting to our outdoor spaces.

It’s easy to get involved too, you simply have to step outside for an hour on one of the designated dates and record what you see.

The campaign, which has been established since 1979, invites people of all ages across the UK to spend an hour counting birds that visit their garden.

More than 519,000 people across the UK took part in the survey in 2016 and counted 8,262,662 birds in total. The top three birds were the house sparrow, starling and blue tit.

Our expert staff are always on-hand to offer tips on feeding any wild birds that might visit your garden as well as advice on bird baths and nesting boxes.

It’s important to feed any wild birds during the colder months of the year to ensure they survive. Food and water need to be put out on a regular basis. Birds require high energy, high fat foods during the cold winter weather to maintain their fat reserves so they can survive frosty nights.

We stock a variety of bird feed, tables and fat reserves in store.