Eastern RosellaOh how we love ye.

Well, not neces­sar­ily all of ye, and maybe not espe­cially these col­our­ful little num­bers as they meth­od­ic­ally strip the buds from the flower­ing cherry tree. You, Rosella, made this Wel­ling­tonista wish moment­ar­ily for the .410 he used to use as a kid. But that would be crim­in­ally irre­spons­ible in a built-up area, as well as a ser­i­ous digres­sion from the sub­ject mat­ter of this post­ing.

Onward.

This week is Land­care Research’s Garden Bird Sur­vey:

The basic format of the garden bird sur­vey is that people spend 1 hour dur­ing a spe­cified week in winter watch­ing birds in their home gar­dens, pub­lic parks, or school grounds, and record­ing the largest num­ber of each spe­cies they see at any one time. When repeated over a num­ber of years this will provide valu­able inform­a­tion on changes in dis­tri­bu­tion and pop­u­la­tion trends of birds in our urb­an envir­on­ment.

This recent fine weath­er provides the per­fect oppor­tun­ity. It’s inev­it­able that you’ll prob­ably not see the occa­sion­al spec­tac­u­lar vis­it­or in the hour you choose, like that fal­con that was hunt­ing the West­ern Sub­urbs a few years back, but at least you’ll be doing your bit for sci­ence.

And what could be nicer than a quiet hour out­side count­ing the birds?