I took 52 photographs this morning. Many of them are faulty, most of them are uninspired, and several are already slowly pixelating in the bin. I didn’t stop to plan, just grabbed the camera and started shooting whilst cooking breakfast.

Over the last few weeks I have been thinking that the only way to improve my photography is to take more pictures, so today, I just switched on and pointe. I am a bit rusty but I will improve.

Even if I don’t improve I’m bound to get some good shots just by accident. And that, more or less, is what happened. The dunnock is quite good, the blackbird and pigeon are OK. The magpie looks blind, but I wanted it because it shows the sheen of blue and green on the black. And the ubiquitous squirrel looks much the same as all the other pictures of squirrels gorging on sunflower seeds. Both carrion crow shots were blurred, and the final shot of that sequence was just a patch of grass.

Meanwhile, as I cooked, I missed shots of robins, blue tits and great tits. I have others, but it would have been nice to get a more complete set of pictures.

Ornithologically speaking, we have a dull garden. The BTO listing of my reports so far show we have had 17 species in the garden, some only once. This will rise to 18 species after my next report as we had our first carrion crow this week.

We had more species when we fed on the farm, but that’s to be expected when you are next to farmland.  However, a problem we also had there was the feeders being taken over by jackdaws at times. Mostly they just fed in the chicken field but we often had mass attacks that shut everything out of the feeders. We got round that by feeding fat balls (their favourite) on the far side of the building.

So far we’ve had a few visits from jackdaws but only a small number at a time. They have only visited us in two of the last 11 weeks. Same for starlings – often a pest species – only seen in four weeks of the eleven, and usually just one bird.

When you think my mother used to throw some bread, a few seeds and some scraps out on top of a wall, and regularly attract twenty or thirty finches and tits, I feel like we are putting on a poor show. However, when you look at the way bird populations have plummeted over the last fifty years, we are lucky to get any. Thirty six years ago when I moved to Nottingham, I regularly had song thrushes and sparrows in the garden. It must be thirty years since I last saw a song thrush in a garden, and in fact they are rare anywhere these days.

There’s a very good statistical analysis here, which shows that song thrushes have declined by 47% since 1970. That’s only one view. In my garden they declined by 100% just over 30 years ago. The rate of decline obviously varies depending on the factor causing it – disease, farming practices, climate change, conditions in places where they migrate to, European idiots with shotguns – and some are even increasing (blackcaps and red kites being two examples).

Anyway, whatever is happening I am trying to help out with extra food, even if they don’t always appreciate it.