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So you’ve been birding during your holiday, at your local reserve or simply watching birds in your garden, and hopefully filled a few pages of your notebook. What next? Do your day’s observations remain in your notebook and memory?
What do you do if you want to find out how many times you’ve seen a Nuthatch at your local reserve, or the percentage of visits where you have seen a Kestrel? How can you ensure that your observations mean something from a conservation perspective? The answer is recording.
The RSPB, along with the British Trust for Ornithology, Scottish Ornithologists Club and Birdwatch Ireland are partners in the BirdTrack project. This is a web-based database that allows users to enter their sightings into one huge database (which currently holds more than 10,000,000 records). These records are then made available to the BirdTrack partners and are used to inform our conservation decisions. How?
On a local level, imagine you have visited a local farm on 50 occasions and have recorded Skylark on each visit, but on your subsequent ten visits, you don’t see a Skylark at all. This should ring alarm bells with you, but it will also do so with the BirdTrack partners. Questions will be asked about why they have suddenly disappeared and what steps can be taken to restore the population.
On a national level, if BirdTrack users nationwide suddenly report a drop in Skylark numbers, this tells the BirdTrack partners that the problem is national – and again, investigations can be made. It also gives us valuable data about migration timing.
But what can BirdTrack do for you?
It allows you to keep all of your records from all of the sites you have visited in one place. Your records can only be seen by you, your County Recorder (if you choose to make your records available) and the BirdTrack partners.
You can carry out searches to find out:
It also allows you to produce maps, with markers highlighting where you have seen a particular species. And much more besides! Here are a few examples:
This is my homepage:
A map of all local locations I have recorded Grey Partridge:
A search to find out on how many occasions I have recorded Hobby in the last five years:
Let us know what you think!
ATB,
DOM
Leave only footprints, kill only time.
Thank you Darren for this timely reminder, :-)
I did set up an account a few years ago when the project started but have let this lapse in recent times whilst I was a lot less active as a birder.
I will be recovering / recreating an account ASAP as I agree that If the data is un-available to the people that can make a difference then things might be missed
Best regardsNigel
| My Images | Newport Wetlands on Flickr @barman58
Hi Darren
I think that recording with BirdTrack sounds like a great idea. :-)
It's something that I might get involved in.
Best wishes Chris
Click Here to see my photos
I hate to say, I'm registered on BirdTrack but I'm not very good at writing records! I did try to keep a record of the birds that were appearing on the river, but that didn't last long!
Millie & Fly the Border Collies
Darren,very well put,as having the dubious honour of being the recorder for our local bird club I am trying to get these points over to members all the time.For my personal records I always put sightings onto Birdtrack and when outside my normal area I tend to use casual sightings on BTO Atlas for special sightings.A large proportionof birders keep records but I would think a great number of the onfo ends up at the back of the cupboard along with all the other bits of paper we keep for later but never sees daylight again.Would you mind if I printed a copy of your thread off to use to try and gee a few members up to keep records?
Pete
Birding is for everyone no matter how good or bad we are at it,enjoy it while you can
By all means!
The more people we can encourage to use BirdTrack, the better we will understand their distribution, population dynamics and changing migration timings.
Good luck!
Darren
Wendy S said: Darren,very well put,as having the dubious honour of being the recorder for our local bird club I am trying to get these points over to members all the time.For my personal records I always put sightings onto Birdtrack and when outside my normal area I tend to use casual sightings on BTO Atlas for special sightings.A large proportionof birders keep records but I would think a great number of the onfo ends up at the back of the cupboard along with all the other bits of paper we keep for later but never sees daylight again.Would you mind if I printed a copy of your thread off to use to try and gee a few members up to keep records?
Thank you for your information with Bird Track
Currently with the amount of visits Dave and I go on to UK Reserves - this would be a great idea for us to commit some of our time to this website.
Of course we have our favourite places too so that would aldd to assisting the cause with species of birds
Would this website cover birds from abroad, or is there another existing website we can use - as we go to Menorca each year and we will be going the same this year too - this would help species there especially the Bee-eaters as they attend once a year only in May-time.
Regards
Kathy and Dave
I use Birdtrack quite a bit to record my sightings.
The roving records are good for the casual bird watcher as they still are used in the annual counts for wintering and breeding birds.
Its also a very satisfing task to known that you ahve helped that little bit towards conservation and science.
Craig
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. - Albert Einstein
Hello Kathy,
For birds overseas, this is a great website.
Nicki C said: Hi Darren Thank you for your information with Bird Track Currently with the amount of visits Dave and I go on to UK Reserves - this would be a great idea for us to commit some of our time to this website. Of course we have our favourite places too so that would aldd to assisting the cause with species of birds Would this website cover birds from abroad, or is there another existing website we can use - as we go to Menorca each year and we will be going the same this year too - this would help species there especially the Bee-eaters as they attend once a year only in May-time. Regards Kathy and Dave
Thank you for the link and we will use it this year after we are back from our holidays to Menorca in May-time.
Thanks for that. I will make use of this site for the LNR birds