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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.
For those worried about making records, the site is very user friendly and walks you through the process.
It's both what you do and the way that you do it!
You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren. William Henry Hudson (1841 - 1922)
mpiekp said: For those worried about making records, the site is very user friendly and walks you through the process.
Pete
Birding is for everyone no matter how good or bad we are at it,enjoy it while you can
well i dont but most of the time i am in my back garden and see many birds mostly flying over lots of birds of prey but its hard to tell what they are often the colours and markings cant be seen and the other this is where do you say these birds are?
the friedly bid watcher
Hi redrobin
If you are interested, just register, the site will walk you through. It will given grid references you can just click on a map and call it what ever you want
Another way you can help towards conservation by using BirdTrack is that your records will automatically filter into the Bird Targeting Conservation Project. The project aims to target conservation action towards our most declining species such as Lapwing, Nightingale, Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, etc.
If we can map them, we can allocate resources to the areas where they are most needed - but only with your help.