An All-Day Birdwatching Challenge
I am woken by the sound of my alarm at 5:00 in the morning.
I look through my window and peer into the darkness beyond the stretch of road illuminated by street lamps. A robin is singing there on one of the branches. Lying awake in my bed I take a moment listening to this robin pouring its song into the night. Even at this early hour some birds like the robin are already getting busy- time to get up. I make my final preparations and head out to do some birdwatching- not just any birdwatching, but some seriously intense birdwatching.
The challenge: to see as many birds as possible on the campus and residences before sunset. The reason I set myself this challenge is to convince you, and also myself, that there are great opportunities to see birds just outside your door. To see nature I’ve always assumed that I needed to get out of the city and I’ve never made a concerted effort to look for nature in the urban wild spaces I pass through every day. So can I prove myself wrong? I am about to find out.
Outside the air is cool and bracing. The sky had now turned a purplish colour, meaning that it would not be long before sunrise. The robin is still singing somewhere in the tree in front of me. I spend some time looking for it, but to no avail. Wherever I stand to get a good view the sound of the song seems to shift, like an ethereal voice wandering through the high branches. Somewhere behind it I hear an owl. It often sits there in the early morning, presumably looking for a tasty morsel scurrying about on the clearing below. I exit the driveway to my flat and decide to take a stroll around my neighbourhood. I hear more robins in trees and bushes and sitting on the stone garden walls, joining the others in the morning chorus. The song of the robin has always enchanted me, possibly because it’s one of the few bird songs to listen out for in the winter months. It has a kind of thoughtful tune if you listen closely. But this melodic song, I then reflect, is really a battle hymn which robins use to proclaim their territories. As the ornithologist David Lack once pointed out, the Christmas cards which have robins sitting harmoniously side by side are completely missing the point!
I make my way to the Edge in Endcliffe where I meet some birdwatchers from the University Birdwatching Society and some other people who have come for the society’s Give it a Go event. At around half past nine we start walking towards the green periphery of Endcliffe. Hardly a hundred metres from where we started someone spots a flock of goldfinches in a tree. They are eagerly feeding on the young buds, like many other birds at this time of year. When they fly off I try to count them as fast as I can. That’s 10, no 23…30 is my best guess. As we come to the wall surrounding the residences I can cross off several birds I expected to see today: great tits, blue tits, a nuthatch…
At this point I have to confess that I didn’t stick to the limits of the challenge. In Endcliffe Park we saw some dippers and a kingfisher, but sadly I had to exclude those from my list. After my little detour I follow the route back on my own towards the university. I walk all the way to St. George’s Church where I settle down on the grass watching groups of wood pigeons on the ground. And then to my surprise I see redwings, starlings and a mistle thrush, not to mention all kinds of small birds flying about. But the crowning birds on my list would have to be the pair of peregrines at St. George’s. One of them sits like a statue on the top of a spire, seeming perfectly at home as a guardian of the church. All these birds in the heart of an urban landscape!
The full list: 17 blackbirds, 6 blue tits, 1 bullfinch, 11 carrion crows, 1 coal tit, 30 goldfinches, 5 great tits, 2 jays, 16 magpies, 1 mistle thrush, 2 moorhens, 1 nuthatch, 2 peregrines, 2 redwing, 11 robins, 2 song thrushes, 4 starlings, 1 tawny owl, 21 woodpigeons and 2 wrens. That’s 137 birds and 20 different species. Not bad for a university campus. Even so, there are bound to be many species I missed. Many birds will be returning from abroad soon and I reckon it wouldn’t be hard to beat my record. So I challenge you to do better than I did and take up the ultimate birdwatching challenge! Don’t forget to record your sightings on BirdTrack, of course, and join the University Birdwatching Challenge. Look up 'Sheffield University Birdwatching Challenge' on Facebook. You can even record birds on your phone or i-pad now with the app! You can sign up here.
Words by Louie Rombaut
Photographs by Luke Nelson
