THEY carry a vivid splash of red and yellow and chances are they are coming to a garden near you.

The goldfinch, a bird species rare to the UK, is finding this area a new and attractive habitat.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has just released the results of its Big Garden Birdwatch survey.

It says a quarter of all Kent gardens are receiving regular visits from goldfinches and believes that within three years, they will have hit the Top 10 of most popular visitors to your bird table.

The main reason, according to the RSPB, is that bird lovers are fuelling the appetites of goldfinches by putting a thistle-type seed out as food.

Traditionally fond of thistles and teasels, goldfinches are finding the new foodstuff much to their liking and easy to digest with their small, fine beaks.

Adrian Thomas, RSPB spokesman, said: “The goldfinch has made a rapid climb to 13th position in the table with 0.83 visits on average per garden. At this rate, we forecast goldfinches will make the Top 10.”

The Kent results of the RSPB’s survey – an annual count by millions of householders over two days at the end of January – reveals that the starling is the most common species, with an average of 6.38 birds per garden.

The house sparrow is second with 5.66.

But both species are diminishing year by year. In 1991, the first year that figures were recorded for Kent, the house sparrow topped the list at 15.30, followed by the starling at 12.20.

Over the past 16 years, the statistics reveal that starling sightings in this area have dropped 54 per cent and the house sparrow 63 per cent.

The song thrush, ninth in the Top 10 in 1991 with 1.00 sightings per garden, is now down to 0.17 and languishing in 20th place.

But the good news is that many other species are flourishing.

Compared with the 1991 figures, blue tits are up two per cent; blackbirds up one per cent; wood pigeon 87 per cent ; chaffinch 38 per cent; robin 15 per cent; great tit 21 per cent, and magpie 14 per cent.