Is the Big Garden Birdwatch a waste of our time?

Morning Ian,  I agree with what the majority of members are saying and the fact that Birdwatch, despite the valuable scientific exercise and the changing trends in bird activity,  can also encourage both old and young to get involved in bird watching, understanding the importance of conservation and maintaining awareness to benefit us and future generations and also to help nurture a love and appreciation for nature in general;   I'm all for opening peoples' eyes to nature and especially teaching children from an early age to learn and become involved in counting birds as it helps them recognise species, appreciate the amazing variety of birds we have around us and hopefully teach them the wonders of nature in general.     I also understand that as a none funded by Government Society, the RSPB does indeed, need to have a certain amount of flexibility when it comes to marketing ........how else can we alert people who may be interested in supporting such societies without giving them the necessary information about the RSPB's valuable work.     I for one will certainly be involved in future bird watching surveys and wish the RSPB every success for the future.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the forms all the info is there if you read everything on them, there is also an option for help!!  

I had a test in school going back some years now, some kids started the test as soon as they got it ignoring the instructions to read every page before starting, on the very last page was a question asking us to not fill in the paper or put any info apart from name, date & class on the first page, hence many people did the test because they had not read the whole paper, I was one of them & I learned a very important lesson that day!

Just saying and another point I am a recruited member through this very important event, been a member a few years now, there is always the option to say no, I didn't feel pressured to join or donate & I feel great that I joined, my family have been much more interested in birds & nature as a whole which is something magical that you can share together, I know my money helps to do so much, much more than I can list here!

Sooo thank you to RSPB helping generations of people coming together to save our birds & wildlife for future generations, I can think of nothing sadder than not hearing birdsong & being able to watch & enjoy our birds!

Regards gayle the lil robin

Good afternoon everyone

The main thing is that we are all enjoying the very nature that is surrounding us, I used to do simple nature walks with my 4 sons many years ago, encouraging them to watch, listen, touch [where appropriate] & look, ask questions about what they had found, if I didn't know the answer or it warranted further investigation we would look it up in books, both at home & in the library [we didn't have the luxury of a PC back then] This might be a simple thing like a leaf, but it was very engaging for both the children & myself, well until their love of football took over :)

I now have a second wind, living it all over again through the eyes of my grandchildren.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that we are living the natural world, we have done it in the past, trying to help in the present, to protect it for the future. Scientists can't be in all places at once, so we the public are called up on to help with the daily chores so to speak.

To be completely honest, it never entered my head as to how the data would be used, assuming & leaving that to the powers that be...

Whatever, right or wrongly it was as always a very enjoyable time & I will continue to do it for as long as I can.

[Edited for clarity (again) at 0220 on 18 February 2013]

Thank you for the replies.

Firstly, in view of some of the things that have been said, I'd like to clarify what my complaint was and wasn't about.

I didn't say bird watching was a bad thing!  The more people appreciate the natural world the better.  People keep re-stating that point as if I had denied it, which I did not!

Nor have I said that the RSPB shouldn't try to raise funds and recruit new members.  There is nothing wrong with marketing provided it is honest and it doesn't pretend to be something it is not.

So I'm not knocking birdwatching or the RSPB generally.  My gripe is purely with this particular mass-participation "scientific" survey, which appears to be ill thought out from a scientific standpoint, and which I therefore suspect was not really designed by or for scientists at all, but by and for marketeers.

[To avoid these misunderstandings I now wish I'd headed my post "Is the Big Garden Birdwatch a wasted opportunity for science?"].

Secondly, I wish to apologise to Ian H for saying that he lied to me.  I have discovered that when submitting the results, if instead of clicking on the "Start here" button on the right you click on the "Log in" button on the left (under where is says "if you registered or have a Community account")...



...then a page comes up with a link at the bottom that says "To submit results for someone else or for a different address please start here."



This is presumably what he was referring to, so I humbly apologise for saying that he made it up.

There are two problems with this alternative link, however.

Firstly, it won't be used by ordinary members of the public who are just trying to submit their results, and aren't "registered or have a Community account".  When I first tried to submit my results I didn't know what "registered or have a Community account" meant.  (I'm still not entirely sure).

And secondly, that alternative link doesn't do anything anyway - it just takes you to the same place that you would have gone to if you had clicked on the "Start here" button in the first place.

So my original point still stands.  The only geographic location that you are asked to provide is your home address, and you are asked for that at the end, under the heading of "Your details", at the same time that you are asked for your phone number and E-mail address.



There is no facility to enter the location where you did the bird watch if it is different from your home address.  Indeed you are never asked where you did the bird watch at all.  [The reference to "your garden" I had thought was just a way of saying "the garden you watched".  One can ask somebody about "your football team" without implying that they are a Russian oligarch].

It seems likely that the vast majority of surveys submitted by people who did the bird watch away from their home will have incorrect geographic data attached by the RSPB who apparently assumed, in a rather middle-class way, that everybody taking part would be a householder with their own garden.  No doubt these errors will be at least partly compensated for by "averaging out" in this large survey.  But why not just ask that simple question, and avoid introducing the errors in the first place?

And I'm at a loss why people seem to think the time of day doesn't matter.  If the next time the survey is run everybody does the bird watch in the middle of the night, will the RSPB conclude that all garden birds have gone extinct except a few owls and nightjars?

[Obviously this won't happen literally - I'm exaggerating to make a point.  No doubt it will be argued that any discrepancies that arise from differing times of day will be taken care of by averaging.  But if you don't ask what time of day people are doing the bird watch then you can't know what the average represents.  And why bother with this complicated statistical fudge anyway?  If the designers of this survey had cared they could have simply asked the question and got the real gen.]

Roy W says "this would require changing the survey (and in many cases making it more complicated)".

Would it really be too complicated to ask the following two simple questions, in the science segment and before the marketing segment (which should be clearly kept separate):

"Please enter the postcode of the location where you did your bird watch",

and

"Please enter the date and time when you started your hour's bird watch".

Even a small child could understand those questions, surely?  If the RSPB's web designers and statisticians find them too complicated to contemplate then I think the RSPB need to get some new web designers and statisticians.

Sorry to be such a grump, but if we are all too afraid of offending people to say what we think then nothing will ever change.

Best wishes to you all,

Graham 

If my whinge leads to improvements in the next survey, as Roy W and Ian H have hinted it may, then my making myself unpopular here by speaking my mind has not been in vain.  I am pleased and impressed.

But I do hope that any changes will be aimed at increasing the scientific value of the survey to match perceptions, rather than going the other way, dumbing it down and downplaying the science when promoting it.

Not to use this uniquely huge survey to do good science would be a criminal waste.

I hope we can all agree on that.

Thank you for listening.

Thanks to you all for your further comments of support for the survey!

Grhm, thanks also for your suggestion for making submitting the survey location less confusing, which I have already passed on to the survey team. We appreciate feedback and can handle constructive criticism however, posting insults about the staff who put the survey together every year, that's just not good form at all, please familiarise yourself with the terms and conditions of the forums before your next post, especially the bit about treating others how you would wish to be treated.

With regards to recording the survey time, we want to keep the survey as quick as possible for participants, we've never asked for time, weather or the day of the survey in the 30 plus years of surveying simply because we don't need this information. It has nothing to do with fears of over complicating it at all.

These factors add nothing to the scientific value of the survey. It may tell us when people prefer to take part in the survey but as a scientific tool, the survey is focussed on monitoring trends in garden bird numbers from one year to the next. The time of individual surveys is just not going to give us any usable information to further our knowledge of trends in garden birds. We're not dumbing down the science, we are just asking for the key bits and it continues to work for us as it has done over the last 30 or so years!

If you want to record sightings of birds with a time frame included then you can do so until your heart is content via Birdtrack which I thoroughly recommend.

IanH has already given an 'official' answer to your latest posts Grhm, but I'd like to answer the comments that refer to things I have posted...

Grhm said:

And I'm at a loss why people seem to think the time of day doesn't matter.  If the next time the survey is run everybody does the bird watch in the middle of the night, will the RSPB conclude that all garden birds have gone extinct except a few owls and nightjars?

[Obviously this won't happen literally - I'm exaggerating to make a point.  No doubt it will be argued that any discrepancies that arise from differing times of day will be taken care of by averaging.  But if you don't ask what time of day people are doing the bird watch then you can't know what the average represents.  And why bother with this complicated statistical fudge anyway?  If the designers of this survey had cared they could have simply asked the question and got the real gen.]

Roy W says "this would require changing the survey (and in many cases making it more complicated)".

Would it really be too complicated to ask the following two simple questions, in the science segment and before the marketing segment (which should be clearly kept separate):

"Please enter the postcode of the location where you did your bird watch",

and

"Please enter the date and time when you started your hour's bird watch".

Even a small child could understand those questions, surely?  If the RSPB's web designers and statisticians find them too complicated to contemplate then I think the RSPB need to get some new web designers and statisticians.

As IanH has said, recording the time of day will only provide information on when participants choose to do the hours survey. There is no useful information whatsoever to be gained from knowing the time of day unless a lot of additional data is also collected to allow the reasons for any apparent discrepancies to be analysed. For example, the number of birds visiting a garden can be expected to depend on factors such as the time of day food is put out (especially if there is a regular time), weather conditions at the time of the observations and immediately prior to them, activities in adjacent gardens, and many others.

The postcode is a simple question that may be relevant, but their would be a lot more questions needed if anything relevant (with regard to the birds activities) was to be gained from asking about time. The RSPBs statisticians will be well aware that there is no point in gathering information that realistically will be of little use. It is possible that recording the time of day was considered when the garden birdwatch survey was first started, if so the question "What sort of useful scientific information would be gained from asking this question?" would have been considered.

What do you think would be gained?

Grhm said:

The reference to "your garden" I had thought was just a way of saying "the garden you watched".  One can ask somebody about "your football team" without implying that they are a Russian oligarch

This is a fair point, and I would agree that having a clear option allowing results to be entered for an address other than where the person completing the film lives would probably be sensible. On the other hand though, I very much doubt that this would have any noticeable effect on the results.

I'm no survey design expert (which gives me a nicely uncluttered perspective) but I can't see what exact location and time would add. This is a random sample survey as anyone in the UK can pitch in with data and, as such, provides a comfortably hefty sample size when applied to the UK as a whole. It's a fact of life that you're going to get more responses from the big population centres and fewer from remote villages. Problems arise, therefore, when you try to subdivide the sample to yield local level data. Your metropolitan area postcodes may well provide you with statistically reliable data but the same won't be true of, say, Exning, or Hutton-le Hole or Nolton Haven, or Threlkeld.  A great many UK postcodes wouldn't provide a sample size big enough to identify population trends down to postcode level so what's the point?

Similarly what would survey time data tell us? Blue Tits are commoner at breakfast time?  Unless they're flitting off across the channel for lunch that won't be true. Presence in gardens will be affected by all sorts of random influences like Sparrowhawk visits, sudden showers, barking dogs, the postman calling, feeders running out etc etc. I doubt if too many nocturnal surveys were happening........

The results are out! And this prompted me to check out this feed. When I do the garden birdwatch, I carry out several surveys during the weekend, each for an hour. It is surprising how consistent the results turn out to be across the day, unless of course it is getting dark. Sometimes I get an extra visitor, but I have found that birds return to the garden to feed about every 20 minutes.

What I find frustrating is the number of birds that do not visit the garden during the hours that I watch over that weekend who are otherwise regular visitors - nuthatch, blackcap, bramblng, sparrowhawk, bullfinch and more recently some longtailed tits although they were nowherre to be seen in my garden at the end of January.