This weekend will bring Belgium its yearly ‘bird counters weekend’! This event is one of the best examples of citizen science in the country, as every person with a garden can participate. You just have to spend half an hour in the weekend counting the birds that come and visit the garden.

With a little help of bird feeders, these visits can be fairly spectacular with impressive diversity. Natuurpunt, our main organisation for nature conservation, collects the data from all these gardens over the whole country and uses them to follow the patterns of our garden birds over the years.

For my Belgium readers, this post can serve as a little reminder to put out some food and keep an eye on the window for a while this weekend.

The non-Belgians can just enjoy these pictures of house sparrows enjoying delicious bread crumbs. Year after year, the house sparrow turned out to be the most common garden bird, but unfortunately, numbers are declining steadily lately.

It had to give its gardenbird-crown to the finch and the great tit, but I hope for upward trends one day that bring back these cute fellows to our gardens!