RSPB Pocket Garden Birdwatch
Description
RSPB Pocket Garden Birdwatch
A practical guide to attracting, feeding and observing birds in your garden
Expanded and updated with data from the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch
By Mark Ward
Published: 2nd January 2009 Price: £5.99
Originating in 1979 and celebrating it’s 30th year in 2009, the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch takes place 24-25 January 2009 and is the world’s largest bird survey. Almost 400,000 participants took part during the 2008 event and some six million birds were spotted across 228,000 gardens with the house sparrow claiming the top position for the most birds seen in gardens last year. Despite being top of the bird table, house sparrows have seen alarming decreases in the last 30 years, dropping from an average of 10 birds per garden to 3.6.
Bird watching is undeniably one of the most popular of all hobbies and one that can literally be done on your doorstep. Sitting in the garden or looking out through a window, you will usually see more than one bird stop by to investigate what your garden can offer.
RSPB Pocket Garden Birdwatch provides practical, achievable advice on how to make your garden more attractive to birds so that you can sit back and watch them explore, feed and even raise their families. Each season is outlined with the major bird activities and feeding requirements. Divided into three chapters with in-situ photography of birds as seen in the wild, the book covers important subjects such as bird behaviour, shelter, food and practical identification advice.
The perfect companion for you and your family for the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch 2009.
RSPB Pocket Birds of Britain and Europe – The UK’s number one pocket guide
By Jonathan Elphick and John Woodward
Published: 2nd January 2009 Price: £8.99
Compact and easy to use, this stunning fully revised guide uses the highest quality close-up photography to bring over 300 species to life on the page. RSPB Pocket Birds of Britain and Europe covers the 320 most commonly seen bird species in Europe, divided into six easily recognisable groups: passerines, gamebirds & other non-passerines, wading birds, waterfowl, seabirds and owls & birds of prey. Within each group, the birds are arranged broadly by family, so that similar looking species appear together for ease of comparison, and generally in ascending order of size, so that the smallest birds are at the beginning of a section and the largest at the end.
Each of the six groups opens with an introductory page describing the group’s shared characteristics. Photographs of representative species show the diversity in the group and a typical page describes two species with one or more photographs, supported by artworks of the bird in flight. Annotations, scale indicators and a set of simple symbols add key information such as sex, approximate age and seasonal plumage. Each profile also features a map showing the range of the bird, with colours indicating seasonal movements.
Both the beginner and the more experienced birdwatcher will discover a perfect companion in RSPB Pocket Birds of Britain and Europe, and one that will become an indispensable part of Big Garden Birdwatch 2009 and of every birdwatching trip.
