Blogging seems to be so old fashioned nowadays – I just saw that the Nabu Germany now also advertises Twitter. To follow the discussion about this year’s summer bird census, called Stunde Der Gartenvögel, you can use the tag #stg11.
This weekend everybody is invited to spend one hour counting (and identifying) birds in the garden or a different place, and report the results back to support scientific long term observations on the biodiversity in our “civilized” environment.
Not much content on Twitter yet, though. So for you here is the result of me counting birds in Munich Alt-Bogenhausen, one of the greener corners of this not-everywhere-so-green city.
I am getting better in identifying birds by their song, therefore my list actually is a little bit longer than last year’s 
- Blackbird – three. Actually they were everywhere, but you ought to only count those you can see at the same time (they might fly behind your back to the next corner and continue singing there… not probable? Who knows…)
- Great Tit – Two. They confused me without end because I actually saw two juvenile first, already big enough for me to think “hey, this is a different type of swamp tit!”. Embarrassing enough, but you don’t see the little ones that often!
- Blue Tit – One. Very busy very high up in a tree, no time to loose to collect food for the chicks.
- Chaffinch – Three, a complete family with a chick being fed by Mom. And I saw a second lonely chick trying to “climb” a huge tree with a trunk diameter of certainly more than two feet without success. I hope it did not fall from the nest. While I watched, it tried again and again to climb that wall that must have seemed like the Eiger Nordwand from its perspective. But probably it helps if you have two wings, even if they were not flight functional they seemed to provide some stability when beaten fast enough. When I passed by the same tree 20 minutes later again, the little one was gone. I like to think he made it
- Great Spotted Woodpecker – One. They are quite common around here, and I got a good and long look at this individual.
- Carrion Crow – One. You can’t leave the house without seeing them around here.
- European Greenfinch – Two. These had eluded me the prior years, but maybe only by now I have learned to look at the highest tree tops to find them.
- Eurasian Collared Dove – One. Beautifully colored bird.
- Common Swift – Eight. My current favorite species, I keep watching their aerial maneuvers from my balcony in the evenings
- Common Chiffchaff – One. At least, I kept hearing one, I didn’t see it.
Oh, and as usual you can see the online results of the bird census over at the LBV. Will be interesting to see the trends in bird population.
To learn more bird-songs, I bought the – German language only, sorry – book Grundkurs Vogelstimmen: Heimische Vögel an ihren Stimmen erkennen, written by Hans-Heiner Bergmann and Uwe Westphal. Not sure on my success with that book, though, I will report in a later post, so stay tuned and subscribe!
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