The dawn bird count

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

We met at the reserve gate at half past five, when the car park was almost empty. The warden divided us into pairs and gave each pair a section of the lakeside path. We were to record birds seen or heard during thirty minutes, without counting the same bird twice where we could avoid it. I carried binoculars, while my partner brought a notebook protected by a plastic cover.

The first bird we identified was a blackbird singing from a fence post. Later, a flock crossed the lake too quickly for us to count accurately, so we marked the number as an estimate rather than pretend certainty. We returned to the visitor centre at six fifteen and handed in the sheet. The warden would combine all the records after checking for overlaps between sections. I had expected the hardest part to be waking early. In practice, it was learning when an honest question mark was more useful than a confident number.

Refer to the whole of Source A. Choose the four true statements below. Write their four letters in the answer box. Choose no more than four; if more are given, only the first four distinct letters will be marked.