Bird Atlas 2007-11 The breeding and wintering birds of Britain & Ireland

My copy of this outstanding, weighty tome was delivered yesterday evening and has been well worth the wait. It must weigh around 10 kilos! Hard bound with 720 pages.

• The book is the result of contributions from over 40,000 volunteers and a total financial investment of £1.4 million.
• The advent of online data capture means that this atlas captured 10 times more data than any previous national atlas. It includes over 16 million individual observations of 214 million birds of 502 species.
• Advances in mapping and modelling technologies have enabled the BTO to pull even more meaning from the data - species accounts include new maps that are easy to interpret and will be even more useful to a broader range of users.
• Over 8,000 copies of the book have already been sold, so this looks like being the best-selling BTO book of all time.
• The book highlights some really striking changes to our bird populations over a worryingly short time frame, particularly the breeding abundance change maps for migrant passerines, waders and farmland birds. We need to understand these changes better and we need to do this fast - before it is too late.

Every serious birder should have a copy of this momentous work in their library.

Woody the Woodpigeon

I have a number of Woodpigeons Columba palumbas that visit my garden every day. They will hoover up the morsels from hanging fat ball feeders that drop to the floor, dispatched there by greedy Jackdaws (these guys can make a real mess of a fat ball  in minutes). Of late however my favourite Woodpigeon, who I have named 'Woody' (original eh) has developed a new talent. I have a hanging feeder that contains a mix of seed that is supposedly attractive to finches. My guy 'Woody' has figured out a way to hang on a nearby branch and access these seeds from one of the feeder ports. This guy is a real contortionist. He can now empty a full seed feeder in two days, which presents the dilemma of how often should I refill it? This feeder was intended for small passerines but I am impressed by 'Woody's' technique of hanging in the lilac tree to get to this food source. But this seed mix is expensive.

But I feel obliged to keep filling the feeder.....