The BTO Garden BirdWatch project is launching a Garden Rook Survey today. This will be open to anyone, not just Garden BirdWatcher members, and will run from July to December.

The survey will collect records of Rook behaviour in gardens (Feeding, Caching, Tolerance, Object Play, Social and Vocalization), and will be working with researchers from University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London, building on their previous lab studies.

This is an interesting move into behavioural observations for Garden BirdWatch, and hopefully will engage a few new people. The survey is only for Rooks, and only for gardens - depending on the results we get there may be future, broader work, but this is meant to be small-scale for now.

As this is a small-scale survey collecting mainly qualitative observations, this is being run via Survey Monkey, and there are also paper forms that people can use to record their observations and send them back into us. The survey web pages are at www.bto.org/rooksurvey, and the organiser is Clare Simm.