Garden BirdWatch runs throughout the year, with participants recording their observations of garden birds on a weekly basis. Each recording form holds thirteen weeks of observations, so every three months 1,000s of completed recording forms are returned to the Garden BirdWatch office.

The four quarters are imaginatively titled 'Quarter 1', 'Quarter 2', 'Quarter 3' and 'Quarter 4', roughly corresponding to Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn respectively. The use of these quarters is to help with administration of the project, since the results themselves relate to weeks and not quarters.

Over 10,000 completed recording forms typically arrive at the Garden BirdWatch office over a two-week period. These forms have to be removed from the envelopes (above) in which they arrrive, before being passed through a computer scanner, cleaned and finally analysed by a series of computer programs. Those results entered online are added to the Garden BirdWatch dataset instantaneously, saving the team a great deal of time and enabling results to be presented on a weekly basis.

Click here to find out how you can
submit Garden BirdWatch results online.

Once the forms have been processed and analysed, the results can be examined to see what has been happening to individual bird species. In addition to seeing the annual patterns in garden use, we can also look for longer-term trends of conservation importance. These results are then summarised and passed back to participants through the Bird Table magazine and interactively through the Garden BirdWatch online webpages.

So, while there is a quarterly cycle to the paper-based component of Garden BirdWatch, results from data submitted online are updated on a weekly basis. In this way, we can very quickly see if there has been a sudden arrival of Siskins, or if the Starling reporting rate has taken a turn for the worse.