In praise of Birdtrack

I am a great fan of Birdtrack.  I can see lots of value in the data that are accumulating there in terms of looking at future changes in bird distributions and numbers.

But also it allows me to check changes at my local patch at Stanwick Lakes where I go scores of times each year.

For example, I thought I’d added a species to my patch list last week – marsh tit – but when I looked it was actually my second record there.

I realised the other day that I hadn’t seen a wintering chiffchaff at Stanwick this winter – and I checked and I had remembered that correctly. And thinking about it it seemed to me that I was seeing fewer of them these days than I did back in 2004 when I first started putting complete lists from my regular walks into Birdtrack.  So I checked.

For the last eight winters (1 December – 28 or 29 February), starting with 2004/5 and ending with 2011/12 I saw the following numbers of chiffchaffs: 2,3,3,1,1,1,0,0.  So they’ve never been very frequent but they do seem to have become less usual at my local patch over this period.

I wonder whether the national dataset shows anything similar, or maybe completely dissimilar, over the same period?  And I’m not sure how one would go about analysing it – this type of data presents analytical challenges.

And having said that I am a fan of Birdtrack, and I am, I am not a fan of the new ‘Explore my records’ facility.  Maybe I just can’t drive it properly but I find it very difficult.

But if you are going out for a walk this weekend, then why not keep a list of birds you see and enter it into Birdtrack?

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