Citizen Science

I have participated in every Garden Bird Survey since 2012 at a number of different addresses. Because it’s run in winter, when most home owners set feeders out, birds are attracted to the garden for food, making them easy to count and brings them in from a larger catchment area. And because many people can recognise common garden birds, doing the counts is relatively easy and everyone can participate. Counts are done on a weekly basis and are simply the highest number of birds for that species, in the garden for that week. I have it set up from my home office, so I can see what birds are landing on the feeders throughout the day.

The count runs from end of November/start of December to end of February. Every week, the maximum number of birds seen during that week is recorded; each week is a fresh count.

There were three distinct groups of birds; the first were the dyad group, where typically a male and female pair were observed in the garden.

The most frequent visitors were Robin, Blackbird, Blue Tit and Wood Pigeon. 

The last group were the ‘rare’ birds seen in the garden. In themselves, these birds would not be considered rare, but they were either infrequent visitors and/or hard to spot in the garden. This list included:

The hard to quantify, but certainly can’t be ignored, was the addition of two rescue cats during the Covid summer of 2020 to the household; one cat was a definitive ‘mouser’, but his brother has yet to catch anything. I didn’t track the number of small animals the ‘mouser’ caught, but it must be close to 30 (for one cat); these include house and field mice (particularly baby mice), Robins, Blue Tits, Goldfinches, Wrens, Dunnocks, a Song Thrush, Pigeon and two Goldcrests – the latter species I have yet to see in the garden.

Even though I have a small garden, there were 21 different species of birds recorded. Aside from Goldfinches, sightings of finches were few and far between. Not one Greenfinch spotted in 7 years, and just a handful of Chaffinch sightings for the same period. The low Chaffinch count was a bit perplexing as they had a 90% occurrence in the 2023 garden bird survey.

I joined the Irish Butterfly Monitoring Scheme run by the National Biodiversity Data Centre in 2024. My focus was three sites along a walking route in Baldoyle Racecourse.

Three sites were selected for monitoring. At each site, a 5 x 5 x 5 metre area was surveyed over a 15 minute period, counting any butterflies that entered the monitored zone. Where possible, I did counts at similar times of the day. Count days required a minimum temperature of 17’C (temperature was recorded from Predict Weather). Cloud cover and windspeed was also recorded in general terms. Where possible, counts were done every two weeks. 

Site 2: A bank of bramble running between two fields. Less trafficked.

There were three distinct cycle peaks for butterflies, with species common in May being the most populus.

When we break it down, we have one species common throughout the season, and two distinct species peaks.

Without having a baseline from previous years it’s hard to know if butterfly populations at Baldoyle Racecourse were deemed ‘good’ or ‘poor’. Butterflies were recorded from April through to October, and a broad range of species were recorded. Irish species recording large declines into 2024 were Green-veined White, Large White, Orange-tip and Small White; Green-veined have declined 82% since 2008, but this species was the one of the most numerous at the Racecourse.