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?