Taking stock of visitors to my bird table

LIKE many people with an interest in wildlife, I keep track of the birds in my garden.

Because I’ve been doing this for many years and because I have a large and unruly rural garden the list of species is now quite long. In fact it’s somewhere around 40 to 42 species, despite the fact that I never get water birds or seabirds like gulls.

I can’t arrive at a definitive number because I can’t decide what actually constitutes a bird in my garden. A pair of ravens regularly flies overhead but I’ve never seen one land on the property – does that count?