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Over the weekend, I was one of the hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who sat down for an hour, grabbed a cup of tea and a biscuit, and watched the birds in my garden. Were you?

My bird-feeding strategy paid off reasonably well. Here's what I saw on Saturday morning:

• Greenfinches: 12 at once, wolfing down sunflower seeds we'd scattered on the ground
• Chaffinches: 7, doing the same thing
• Jackdaws: 7. These are my favourite garden birds at the moment. Watching them hanging off the peanut feeder and trundling around the lawn together is very entertaining
  
• Great tit: 4
• Blue tit: 3
• Robin: 3. One singing, one with a broken leg (these two are regular) and one interloper, which didn't stay for long...
• Dunnock: 2
• Coal tit: 1
• Sparrowhawk: 1. As I expected, one turned up 15 minutes in and all the other birds scattered. It sat on the garden fence and waited. Fortunately, it cleared off after another quarter of an hour and peace was duly restored
  
• Wren: 1
• Great spotted woodpecker: 1. It made short work of some peanuts I'd put out with it in mind
  
• Blackbird: 1

The only slightly annoying thing for me was the fact that I was hoping for some tree sparrows. They were seen on Friday afternoon but failed to make an appearance over the weekend. Well, it's their loss, not mine...

The sparrowhawk was thrilling and the jackdaws made me laugh. My count will go into the database with everyone else's, and after a couple of months of analysis by RSPB boffins, the nationwide results will be revealed. What will this year's Top 15 look like?

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I don't know about you, but with the excitement of Christmas and New Year celebrations over, January can seem to stretch out with not much to look forward to.

However, one look out of my window and January doesn't seem so bad after all; whether it's a mixed flock of tits hanging in a tree, a blackbird trying out bits of his song and the wren angrily moving him along, or the local starlings looking for tasty grub in the lawn, I could look at their antics in my garden for hours.

I enjoy watching wildlife, and being lucky enough to work on a nature reserve I get more than my fair share of wildlife fixes. However, when wildlife vists my garden it always feels somehow more special. The birds are visiting my garden because they like what it offers - the shelter it brings, the plants that I'm growing, or maybe the water and additional food that I put out for them.

How cool - my own personal nature reserve, and right outside the backdoor. And the best thing is, you don't have to have acres of space to make a difference for wildlife, either.

I'm lucky that I have a decent-sized garden in which there is already a good variety of plants for wildlife (more by accident than design, mind!) - we let nettles grow in amongst our flower borders (great for attracting butterflies), have plenty of bushes that provide both shelter and juicy berries for the birds to eat, and even have a spot of dead wood lying around (great for mosses, lichens and insects).

However, this weekend as I helped prune the hazel - getting in before the birds start nesting - I got to thinking that there was probably still a lot more I could do in the garden to attract a greater variety of birds and other wildlife.

The great thing is the changes can be as huge, or as small, as I want - I could let parts of the lawn grow longer before mowing, maybe I'll get really ambitious and create a pond for dragon- and damselflies to visit, or I could put up a hanging basket or plant out a window box with a variety of wildflowers that'll not only look pretty, but be great for insects and the birds that eat the insects!

Like the blackbird practising his song in the hope of attracting the best mate he can, I am reminded that maybe this year I should try a few new things in the garden in the hope of attracting the best mix of wildlife I can.

What can you do?

For your own garden inspiration, join our Homes for wildlife project and receive tailored information and advice to create your own nature reserve.

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Today, I've been doing some preparation for Big Garden Birdwatch, which takes place this weekend, 26-27 January.

My masterplan involves the strategic deployment of an arsenal of bird foodstuffs. I bought some tasty fat cake which I'm hoping will pull in a great spotted woodpecker, but I'll also be using up some apples which are past their best. They could attract blackbirds and starlings, or maybe even a fieldfare or redwing.

Apart from anything else, Big Garden Birdwatch is a really good reason to scrutinise what visits your garden. I can spend hours gazing happily out of the window; this weekend, my garden birds get to do their little bit for science.

If one of our local sparrowhawks turns up at any time during my hour-long count, that could disrupt things slightly. You have to look on the bright side: it's such a great bird, I shall be only too pleased to add it to my results form.

Good luck with your Birdwatch, readers!

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Whilst Sunday appeared grey, overcast and generally pretty horrid, staying at home was fairly boring! So, upon looking through various touristy leaflets, we decided on a visit to a local zoo park. Now this isn’t necessarily first on the list, but is quite a nice place to spend a grey, wet Sunday afternoon. I was to be pleasantly surprised.

We mosied round the obligatory sleeping tigers and excitable lemurs and then into the bird section. The exotic creatures on show captivated all the children around us. However, I think that I then turned into the most excited person in park! ‘Look, look, look’ I shouted with all the excitement of a child looking at the tigers. I, however, was not pointing into the cages but into the sky. For what I had seen doesn’t live in Zoos, and a few years ago didn’t even live in England. A red kite! The beautiful, majestic red kite.

This master flyer soared over the park, dipping and diving before one flap of those powerful wings took it forward. I watched, astounded. When I was young, I remember being taken to dark, wet (they are always wet in my mind!) Welsh valleys and woodland in search of this rare, mystic almost, fork-tailed bird. Yet now here I was, staring at one merely half an hour from my home, in the fens of Cambridgeshire! It really is the most awesome of sights.

All the exotic beasts in the Zoo were second to this, a wild red kite in England. A huge smile was on my face, in fact it’s still there!

It’s all too easy to take some birds for granted. It could be robins, starlings, chaffinches, blue tits, dunnocks - whatever it is that you see all the time. Then, something happens that makes you think ‘oh! Perhaps I should look a bit more carefully next time I see one’.

Recently, I went to visit my parents in the village where I grew up. Their garden feels different to how it did when I lived there. There’s no sign of the swings or slide anymore and the grass hasn’t been churned up by my little brother (now aged 26) playing football for some years…

There’s usually something to see when I go back to visit. A few years ago, it was a grey wagtail that dropped in to inspect their pond while I watched. Another time, a female brambling was feeding with the chaffinches on the lawn. That was quite annoying - I had to wait years for my first proper look at a brambling, and my parents hadn’t even noticed it.

This time, it was blackbirds. Hordes of them. We counted carefully: one by the greenhouse, another on the patio, two chasing each other under the cherry tree, another rummaging in the flowerbed, more under the hedge... Altogether, nine, all together in the same, smallish garden!

I felt quite pleased with myself until I saw Brian Tonks’ photo, e-mailed to us after he read our monthly e-newsletter.

His total of 16 really puts mine in the shade.

So, why are there so many blackbirds around at the moment? Imports, that’s why. It’s likely that a large proportion of these birds have flown all the way from Scandinavia to enjoy our mild weather and traditional British earthworms.

Bear that in mind next time you see a blackbird in your garden. Its name isn’t Mr Blackbird, it’s probably Sven, Anders or Lars.

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Regular Notes on Nature readers will probably be building up quite a good picture of the birds we see from our window here, with the webcam feeder stationed outside. Great spotted woodpeckers, magpies and grey wagtails have all featured recently, however today it’s more a case of what we didn’t see.

As we wandered over to the canteen today for a quick breakfast (or in my case, second breakfast!) we stopped near a recent addition to feeders here at The Lodge, one outside the Wildlife Enquiries new offices. The reason for our stop was that I was watching the chaffinches, attempting to turn them into bramblings, when I noticed a yellowy-green bird on their feeder. A siskin! Now those who know me, will know I’m not a big fan of green going with yellow, but I’ll make an exception for this little finch, a winter visitor to these parts.

Now this is all very well, but I wasn’t entirely converted, why is it not on our feeder?! I mean, I like the Wildlife team, but their new feeder seems to have siskins, and, so I’ve heard, even a brambling. What’s wrong with our feeder? Can’t the siskin just fly a little bit further, or just visit once in a while over it’s winter stay?

But that’s partly the beauty of nature, you can’t tell it where to go and what to do, although it would be nice for the bramblings and siskins to discover our feeder, I’m sure it’s the best!

Ps. Maybe it’s a best they don’t, we might not get too much work done if they did!

Getting up at unearthly hours, sitting motionless in a draughty hide for hours at a time and scanning the water until my eyes ache. I’ve tried them all in an attempt to catch a glimpse of an otter at my local nature reserve, Paxton Pits. I have spent a grand total of forty hours looking for these elusive animals since I moved to the village: a statistic I’m not sure whether to be proud of, or not!

You might ask yourself, ‘Hasn’t he got anything better to do?” It’s a fair question. After all, I’ve seen otters before, but seeing one on my doorstep is a whole new ball game. It has become the holy grail.

The sun came out yesterday and full of vim and vigour, I took a walk around the pits. Lots of other people had the same idea and the first hide was a hub of activity.

Small children failed to contain their excitement at seeing the prehistoric shapes of cormorants and herons; their parents apologising for the youthful over exuberance. I didn’t mind. I can think of nothing more enjoyable than seeing others getting excited by wildlife - apart from seeing an otter at Paxton Pits.

I’d been in the hide for half an hour enjoying the wide variety of water birds on show when a gang of geese and ducks began swimming purposefully away from the bank. Something had spooked them. 

A few minutes passed before a passable imitation of the Loch Ness monster surfaced, making my heart race and concentrating my gaze on the far waters of the lake. After what seemed like an eternity, it emerged again. I raised my binoculars in time to see the sleekest of bodies sliding beneath the blue waters again, flipping a long tail as it went. The holy grail was mine at last.

I was ready to announce to the world (well, everyone in the hide) that an otter was on show, but it never showed again. The moment was all mine. I smiled to myself that I should complete my quest at the busiest time of day on the busiest day of the week, when I wasn’t even looking for otters! There's a lesson there somewhere...

I suffer from the winter blues from time to time, but yesterday I heard a sound that showed that spring is not far away.

I love seeing our winter wildlife - particularly those birds that come here as refugees from the northern winter - and am a big fan of frosty mornings, but winter just doesn’t seem to be winter anymore. Gloomy skies, strong winds and wet weather seem to be the norm and crisp, cold days with snow and frost a rarity.

I heard my promise of spring while I was walking through my village to the bus stop to catch the bus to work. It certainly lifted my spirits and put a spring in my step for the rest of the day.

I wasn’t sure at first if my ears were deceiving me and it wasn’t the finest performance I’ve ever heard by any means, but there was no mistaking the unmistakable piping notes of a song thrush warming up its vocal chords.

I stopped to listen for a while, enjoying an ever increasing variety in the song as it tried out different phrases, finished 'tuning up' and picked up the tempo.

Before I knew it, several minutes had passed and I had to run to make sure I didn’t miss the bus!

I took advantage of the Christmas break to visit Norfolk. At Cantley in the Yare valley, we watched white-fronted and bean geese grazing peacefully in the meadows that have been managed specially for them. They've arrived for the winter from their breeding grounds in Siberia, Scandinavia or Russia. The 'wheeoo' whistling calls of wigeons came from a nearby pool - for me, one of the true, atmospheric sounds of winter.

On the coast at Salthouse, a blizzard of snow buntings whirled around the shingle ridge before coming down to feed within a few metres of us, joined by a few Lapland buntings - more northern European breeding birds which come to the UK because it's warmer! Turnstones, wading birds which do just what their name suggests, bickered and chattered around the edge of a shallow pool, not bothered by the assorted walkers and birdwatchers who wandered past.

Eventually the daylight began to run out and we started our journey home. It's always worth keeping your eye out for birds on the way home (if you're not driving, that is). Long, drawn-out skeins of pink-footed geese flew over as they moved from their daytime feeding sites in the fields (where sugar beet tops and potatoes are on the menu) towards the Wash. A flock of lapwings in a field. Fieldfares scattering from a hedgerow where they'd been gorging on berries.

Then, something which is an all too common sight these days... a white bird in a tree or hedge that turns out, on closer inspection, to be a carrier bag. I've read that in Ireland, such objects are referred to as witches' knickers and in South Africa, the national flower.

Only this time - for once in my life - it wasn't a carrier bag, it was a barn owl, teetering at the top of a spindly tree just metres from the road! Verges can be good hunting places for owls, though they often dice with death as traffic rushes past. I only got a brief glimpse of the bag-owl as we drove past, but its image will stay with me for far longer. It's the joy of the unexpected.