Greylag geese, black-headed gulls, maybe even the stork: will these soon be the garden bird friends of great tit, blue tit, sparrow, robin and blackbird? The 21st National Garden Bird Count will take place on the weekend of January 26, 27 and 28. Partly on the initiative of Bird Protection Netherlands, which declared this year the Year of the House Sparrow (see box).
Last year, 140,000 people spread across the Netherlands counted the birds in their garden or from their balcony for half an hour. Schools, petting zoos and other institutions participate.
In this way, bird conservationists want to find out what developments there are. Which species are increasing or decreasing? And above all: what can they do with projects and in discussions with governments and ministries to improve living conditions for our garden birds, i.e. more greenery, fewer fences and above all: more shrubs.
Timo Roeke (41), senior nature conservationist at Bird Protection in the Eastern Netherlands region, sees beautiful but also worrying developments thanks to the counts.
As a volunteer he is also a city bird advisor. “In the Netherlands we have an extremely clean living environment,” he says from his office. “People are increasingly replacing conifer plants with fences, for example. This has a negative effect on, for example, house sparrows, which like to take shelter in dense hedges. This causes the house sparrow to decline.”
Roeke: “We also see that shrubs, preferably berry-bearing native species, are less common in city gardens. People want trees and lawns, not tangled shrubs. But that is the ideal place for shrub breeders such as wren, robin and long-tailed tit.”
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The counting data are welcome for Bird Protection to conduct campaigns, for example, Roeke says. Now that European Nature Legislation is introducing new guidelines to make the world greener, we are sitting down with local and national governments: “We advocate more greenery, both in public spaces and in private gardens. Birds benefit from native plants and not the exotic ones from the garden centers. They provide little or no food.”
A bird counting app
The Garden Bird Count is considered citizen science. Interested parties can download an app with common species and the Bird Protection website provides a manual. For the first time we see species such as gray goose and black-headed gull next to garden heroes such as robin and finch. In a yard in Friesland I once peed two winter storks, which were sitting comfortably on their nest, during a counting weekend of all days. These were two of the average 900 wintering storks. That is also valuable data, says Roeke. Then you see that climate change is playing an increasingly important role. People mainly see seagulls in the city, such as the black-headed gull and the lesser black-backed gull, from their balconies, and a species such as the gray goose is common in gardens with ponds.
Most counters are located in the Randstad, for example 14,000 in North Holland and 18,000 in South Holland. More participants in the province would be desirable, because trends and changes in the rural areas are important. Roeke is concerned about jackdaws, those exuberant flyers where you can see that they have fun flying while tumbling and tumbling: “They have less breeding opportunities now that houses no longer have roof tiles under which they can breed. Sometimes our land should be less cultivated for the birds.”