Results 2011!

An enormous thank you to the huge number of children and teachers who took part in the Big, Really Big and Little Schools' Birdwatches 2011 - we hope you had lots of fun taking part!

88,500 children and teachers from nearly 3,000 classes participated, making our 10th birthday birdwatch the biggest ever!

Top spot

For the second year in a row, blackbirds flew into the top spot, with an average of 4.99 seen per school. Starlings and woodpigeons complete the top three, with an average of 3.61 and 3.06 seen per school respectively.

Check out the county-by-county and country-by-country results below, or see what else made the top 20 for 2011.

Our results also revealed that members of the tit family made up four of the top 20 birds seen in school grounds.

Meet the family

The blue tit, great tit, coal tit and long-tailed tit are familiar faces in both school grounds and gardens. However, did you know that…

• A blue tit is so strong it can hang upside-down by its feet. It does this to find insects hiding under leaves.
• The oldest known blue tit survived an amazing 21 years, but most won't live for more than two years after they have got through their first winter. 
• A great tit's beak changes shape (very slightly) over the year as available food changes. It is longer in the summer to help pick out insects, and shorter and thicker in the winter to help crack seeds open. 
• A blue tit weights the same as a pound coin.
• Blue tits hunt for food in flocks during the winter, often with great tits, coal tits, long-tailed tits and other species, with as many as 200 individuals visiting a single garden in one day. Staying together gives them more eyes to watch for danger, however you wont see them all at once. 
• Great tits time their breeding around caterpillar availability – a pair may catch 10,000 in a season, to feed their growing family.
• Male and female blue tits look pretty much the same to us, but to each other, they look very different. Blue tits can see ultra-violet colour that we simply can't see. If we could, we would see that the male blue tit's blue feathers glow brightly. 
• If a long-tailed tits' nest fails, the pair of birds split up and each goes off to help at it's brother's, father's or uncle's nest. Nests with helpers raise more young than nests without. It seems that these birds will work for the good of the family – even if they don't have any young of their own.

Join us again from 16-30 January 2012, for what we hope will be another record-breaking Big Schools' Birdwatch.

Last modified: 25 March 2011