One hour, one garden, the highest number of each species you see at once. Mine has a bird on it that is not on the list, and it has been in that garden every January since 1994.
Every January, on the last weekend, I sit at the back window with a mug and a pencil for one hour and I count birds.
I have done it since 1994. My mother did it before me from the first year they ran it, and it was her garden and now it is mine, so between us this window has been counted for the whole of it.
The rules are simple and they are the reason the whole thing works. One hour. One garden. You write down the highest number of each species you see at the same time, not the total, because otherwise the same blackbird gets counted eleven times. And then you send it in.
Blue tit, six. Starling, fourteen. Blackbird, two. Wood pigeon, three. Robin, one, because it is always one, because they will not have another one in the garden.
And then the last line, which I write out in longhand every year in the box at the bottom marked "other species seen".
I am going to describe it as plainly as I can and then I am going to stop describing it, because the describing is not the point of this and I have learned that the more I describe it the less anybody hears the part that matters.
It is about the size of a mistle thrush. Slightly bigger. It stands more upright than a thrush does.
It is grey-brown, darker on the back, and there is a paler patch on the throat that is not white and not cream, and in thirty-one years I have never been able to decide what colour it is, which is not something that normally happens to me.
The bill is wrong for a thrush. It is heavier and it is slightly down-curved at the tip.
It has never made a sound.
It comes to the same place every year: the third fence post from the left, on the top of the post, not on the wire.
Now the part that this is actually about.
In 1994 I wrote it in the "other" box as unidentified thrush-type, large. And the form came back, or rather I got the standard letter, and the letter said that records outside the listed species are reviewed and that mine could not be verified and had been excluded from the analysis, and thank you very much for taking part.
That is completely correct procedure. A survey with two hundred thousand people in it cannot accept unverified records or it is worthless. I have no complaint at all and I want that on the record.
I have sent it in every year since and it has been excluded every year since.
In 2003 I got a nice hand-typed letter from somebody in the records team saying that if I could photograph it they would be very glad to look.
I have tried to photograph it eighteen times.
I am not going to claim the photographs come out empty, because they do not. That is the sort of thing that happens in stories and it is not what happens here.
The photographs come out with the post in them.
Every one. Sharp, well exposed, the third fence post from the left, the wire, the fence panel behind, the shrub. No bird.
And I am looking at it through the viewfinder when I press the button. In 2011 I used a camera with an optical viewfinder specifically so that I was looking through the lens itself and not at a screen, and I could see it, and I pressed the shutter, and it is not in the file.
I have tried video. The video has the post in it.
I have tried getting my son to look. He was nineteen and he humoured me and he sat at the window for the hour, and at about twenty past ten he said, oh, and went very quiet, and afterwards he said he did not want to talk about it and he has not since, and he is forty-one now and he still comes at Christmas and we do not discuss it.
So it is not only me. That is the only thing I have ever established for certain in thirty-one years.
Here is why I keep sending the form in, and it is not stubbornness.
It is because of the numbers.
I keep my own book as well as the form: a hardback with a page a year, and on it the counts, in my hand, and my mother's before mine.
In the years the bird is on the post, the rest of the garden is quiet. Not empty. Quiet. The counts come in about a third down across every species, and I do not notice at the time because you never do, you only see it in a column.
In 1997 it did not come. That is the only year in the whole run. I sat the hour and the post was bare and I remember being almost disappointed.
That January the counts were the highest they have ever been. Starling twenty-eight. Blue tit eleven. Something like double.
My mother died in the February of 1997.
I am eighty-one. I am telling you this because I want it written down somewhere that is not my own handwriting, and because a thing I have not said to anybody, including my son, is that in the last four years it has not been on the post.
It has been on the shed roof, which is nearer.
Not much nearer. Nine feet, perhaps. But the post is at the bottom of the garden and the shed is halfway up it, and I have measured the difference with a tape because measuring is the only thing I have ever been able to do about any of this.
2022 was the first year on the shed. Then the shed again, and the shed again, and this January the shed again.
The form goes in on the Monday, the way it always has, and it is excluded, the way it always is, and that is right and proper.
I have started writing a little more in the box than I used to. Not a description. I have stopped describing it.
I write: same individual as previous years, present the full hour, third post 1994 to 2021, shed roof 2022 to date.
Somebody will read that one day, probably a volunteer, and mark it excluded, and quite right too.
But it will be in the file. Thirty-one entries in the same hand about the same bird in the same garden, and one gap in 1997, and the gap is the year my mother went, and I would like somebody to be able to look at all of it together afterwards, because I do not think I will be the one who works out what it counts.