The RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch which takes place this weekend (26-27 January) is slated to be the world’s biggest bird survey. For almost three decades this annual event has attracted amateur birdwatchers to take a snapshot of the birds in the UK’s back gardens.

Last year some 400,000 people took part and spotted 6 million birds across 236,000 gardens. This cost-effective and popular monitoring of the changing composition of the bird population has helped focus bird conservation programmes. RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch

The RSPB’s online bird identifier is neat too