RSPB Birdwatch Begins Saturday

From the RSPB Birdwatch site-


For the past 30 years, we've been asking our supporters to count the birds in their garden. During this time, more than 3 million hours have been clocked up watching and enjoying the birds that visit our gardens (that's more than 380 years!), and every year, some 6 million birds are spotted by you.
Why is the Big Garden Birdwatch in winter? It's cold!
That's precisely why we do it in January. The cold weather brings birds into our gardens, looking for food and shelter, so it's pretty much the best time of the year for watching garden birds.
Ok, but why do I only have to count for an hour?
What is great about this survey is the amount of people who do it. We'd rather have half a million people watching for an hour, than fewer people watching for two or three hours.
So should I do my count at a particular time of day?
No. Any time is fine, although you will see more birds if you get up early! The time of day won't affect the overall results as the differences in bird numbers are evened out by the large number of gardens surveyed.
What about the weather?
The weather varies between years and also across the UK during each Big Garden Birdwatch weekend. Don't worry – because it's so random it doesn't affect the results in the long term.
What happens if I didn't see any birds?
Don't worry, please send your results in anyway. It all counts, even if there was nothing to count. Surveys are as much about what's missing as what's there. Some people see fewer birds than usual during their hour, but others see more than usual – so they balance each other out.

                           

Change 4 Life Website Helping Us Get Healthier

If you are fortunate enough to grow your own food in your garden or allotment chances are you are eating healthily. Add to that the savings in money that can be made and all in all growing your own food has a lot going for it.

The government website Change4Life now has over 417,000 families which have joined. Dance group Diversity has got involved in the programme run by the National Health Service to help get us all, in particular kids, fitter by eating properly and taking exercise.

Did you know, for instance, that "grilled fish fingers have much less fat than fried fish fingers and trimming the fat off bacon can reduce its fat by about a half."

Cold Weather Spell no Fun

The cold `snap` in the UK is dragging on and on, in fact it`s more of an ever-present feature right now.

Snow blankets the country as temperatures struggle to get above freezing.

To keep the cats and dogs off my lawn I`ve placed some litre bottles of water on their side at strategic points (well, haphazard really but I like to think they`re strategic). When the snow arrived last week those bottles were completely covered over. And nothing has really changed. My garden is still covered in virgin snow apart from the tiny footprints of small animals.

It`s a good idea to put some bird food out for the birds, it must be very hard for some of them to find food at this time.