Garden BirdWatch Instructions

Completing the Site Registration Form Online

The Site Registration Form allows you to tell us about your garden and the land that surrounds it. This form should be completed when you first start your Garden BirdWatch recording. You may need to complete a new Site Registration Form if you make major changes to your garden. Any Site Registration Forms that you have completed on paper and submitted to the GBW team will have been scanned and loaded onto the GBW database so they can be viewed online.

The Online version of the Site Registration Form has help available for answering each of the questions asked. Simply click on the 'Help on...' link to display a pop-up window detailing advice on what the question is asking.

The Online form uses a combination of text boxes (enabling you to enter counts of number of trees, age of garden, etc.), drop-down choices (for how much lawn you have, etc.) and tick boxes.

Once you have answered the various questions you will need to click on the 'submit' button. This will check your answers before adding the results to the GBW databases. If you make a mess of answering the questions, you can always click on the 'Reset Form' button to wipe your answers and start again.

NB. If you feel it is not practical or convenient to observe your entire garden, it is quite acceptable to define a small part of the garden as your study area, and record details of just this reduced area on the Site Registration Form. Sometimes it is hard to decide whether birds are in the defined study area or not. Use your best judgement. The criterion for inclusion is that the birds are actually using the study area defined on your Site Registration Form as any kind of resource.

If you wish, you can download the general Garden BirdWatch instructions as a PDF for easy storage and printing. These include some additional guidelines on answering the Site registration questions.