I gave you a list of 73 bird species that I saw or heard on five visits to my local patch of Stanwick Lakes in early September and asked you to pick 5 species that I had seen on all five visits and 5 species I only saw on a single visit.
This was a brain teaser and it seems that your brains were teased! Over 50 of you hazarded a guess (or well thought-through selection).
These are the species you ought to have picked from (and, because I know some will want to inspect them, the others are listed at the foot of this post):
Seen all five times: Mute Swan, Greylag Goose, Canada Goose, Gadwall, Teal, Mallard, Tufted Duck, Cormorant, Little Egret, Grey Heron, Great Crested Grebe, Moorhen, Coot, Lapwing, Black-headed Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Great Black-backed Gull, Woodpigeon, Green Woodpecker, Magpie, Jackdaw, Carrion Crow, Great Tit, Cetti’s Warbler, Long-tailed Tit, Chiffchaff, Blackcap, Wren, Blackbird, Robin, Chaffinch, Bullfinch and Goldfinch.
Seen on just one visit: Pochard, Pheasant, Sparrowhawk, Little Ringed Plover, Green Sandpiper, Snipe, Peregrine, Sand Martin, Willow Warbler, Lesser Whitethroat, Treecreeper, Starling, Spotted Flycatcher, Grey Wagtail and Meadow Pipit.
And the winner is…
There were two correct answers. Second prize (of nothing at all!) goes to Steve Fisher who correctly surmised that he might have been disqualified had he have won since he was standing next to me when I saw some of these species! In fact, he pointed out the only Little Ringed Plover of the visits. Steve knows Stanwick better than I do but he still might have got it wrong. Indeed, had I been asked to do this task in a few months time, when the memories had weakened in my weak brain, I’m not sure that I would have got it right!
But that just makes it all the more impressive that, on the basis of pure ornithological genius (assuming that he didn’t look it up on the Birdtrack database (and I’m sure he didn’t)), the winner is Nick Moran of the BTO. Those BTO staff certainly know their birds and I’m delighted to say that the copy of the book, A Sparrowhawk’s Lament by David Cobham, is in the post to The Nunnery.
I ‘phoned Nick to tell him the good news yesterday and we had a chat about the joys of patch birding. He is a worthy winner.
The wisdom of crowds.
Crowds, even non-expert crowds, are very good at making decisions – there’s even a book about this. The 50+ folk taking part in this little brain-teaser acted like a very clever crowd. Here are some data to prove it (it took quite a while to do this but I won’t swear to the absolute accuracy of all the figures that follow, but they aren’t far out (I will swear that!)).
There were 33 species that were seen by me on every visit. The respondents to this little brain-teaser, in their 260 separate selections, chose 36 species, of which 27 were correct (and therefore 9 were incorrect). I find that pretty impressive in itself. Of the 260 total selections of species, 234 were correct and only 26 incorrect – impressive!
When you look at 26 votes for the 9 species wrongly selected to have been seen on each visit, 15 of those 26 votes were for species seen four times (Blue Tit, Swallow and Dunnock), one for Kingfisher (seen three times), four for species seen twice (Red Kite, Herring Gull, Whinchat and Linnet) and six votes for Starling which I only saw once (but might easily have seen every time on other days – it’s all or nothing with Starlings though!). So, most of the wrong selections were near misses.
And the six species that were never selected but would have been correct answers were: Great Black-backed Gull, Green Woodpecker, Cetti’s Warbler, Long-tailed Tit, Blackcap and Bullfinch – all risky species to choose given the number of more obvious species that you had at your disposal.
In brief, all 15 of the correct species were selected (and amassed 143 votes in all), 23 species were correctly ignored and 35 species were wrongly chosen but they only collected 116 votes. So again, even in this very tricky half of the teaser, most votes went to those few species which were correctly identified.
I think you are a very clever bunch. It makes you believe more strongly in democracy – or does it? And later today, the results of the Scottish independence referendum.
And the other species that were seen, and how many times they were seen
Four visits: Wigeon, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Kestrel, Blue Tit, Swallow, Reed Warbler, Dunnock, Pied Wagtail and Reed Bunting.
Three visits: Buzzard, Common Sandpiper, Common Tern, Stock Dove, Kingfisher, Whitethroat, Song Thrush and Greenfinch.
Two visits: Shoveler, Red Kite, Herring Gull, Jay, Rook, Sedge Warbler, Whinchat and Linnet.
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Many thanks for a fantastic little teaser, Mark! Thank you for taking the time to put it together, offering a great prize and for the ‘phone call with the good news (and for using the apostrophe for ‘phone, which some of my colleagues me for doing)!
Being a fellow avid (rabid?) BirdTracker and patch birder, this was right up my street, though luck played a sizeable part! My patch – the BTO’s Nunnery Lakes reserve in Thetford – is very similar to yours in many ways: former gravel extraction pits along a river, with surrounding scrub/woodland, multi-use (the Nunnery Lakes are also shared with an angling syndicate), on the same latitude (give or take 5 miles) and ~50 miles from the coast (*sob*).
So I simply had a look at my own 5 for 8–12 September…on which the first 5 species out of the hat that I’d recorded every visit were Woodpigeon, Carrion Crow, Jackdaw, Robin and Wren. Here’s where I was very lucky: the only other species I’d recorded on every visit was Pheasant (my patch borders a large estate with a very ‘active’ shoot)…but you only had 1 record! No idea why BirdTrack put Pheasant in 6th place when I ‘‘ (I probably should though!) but it did. Lucky me.
As for the once-onlys, this was harder. I’d seen my first-ever local September Lesser Whitethroat earlier this month (and it quickly vanished, never to be seen again) so I went for that straight away. Next up was Willow Warbler: very scarce inland by the second week of September (assuming you weren’t being fanciful with Chiffchaffs, which I was sure you wouldn’t have been!). I haven’t seen one this month; my last record was 30 August (singing, which was rather special!). Spotted Flycatchers are always will-o’-the-wisp on my patch at the best of times, and certainly by September (I’ve had one September record, and it wasn’t this year) so seemed a fair bet. Grey Wagtail and Peregrine were both a bit speculative. Grey Wagtails start appearing/moving in September but the peak BirdTrack reporting rate isn’t until the end of the month, so I guessed 1 record in 5 visits in the first half of the month was about right – and perhaps your first of the autumn? Peregrine was a true gamble – my sister and brother-in-law live in Higham Ferrers and had Peregrine over their garden the other week so I knew they were around locally and did wonder if you might have had a couple of sightings. Then again, Peregrines are usually on their own by this time of year and roaming about a bit so 1 sighting in 5 visits seemed OK.
Normally I’d have been tempted by Whinchat but this year has been great for them on my patch (seen on 3 dates so far this month, including 2 together yesterday – a brilliant sight!). Lots of other Whinchat reports were coming in too – and they often hang around for a few days – so it got the ‘No’ vote. And the sister/brother-in-law link came in handy for ruling out Red Kite, as I see them every time I visit…unlike here in Thetford.
As you’ll have guessed by now, I love this sort of thing! So much so that I swapped a career in Biology teaching to one trying to inspire birders to log their records in BirdTrack! Using BirdTrack for my daily patch records has changed my birding beyond recognition; I’m now more focussed and methodical in the field, and aware of patterns in species’ local occurrence and detectability that I didn’t even know existed! If you haven’t already, give it a try – you won’t look back 🙂
Nick – thank you for taking part and it, somehow, seems fitting that you ‘won’.
And thank you for the explanation of how you get to the answers you chose – all makes sense.
Pheasant was quite interesting. Because I do record species lists on the Birdtrack app as I walk around, I am quite sensitive to what I have and haven’t seen. The lack of pheasants certainly wasn’t because I forgot to record them. I have checked my Birdtrack records for September at Stanwick and I record Pheasant more often than not, but certainly not every time. And the single day I did record Pheasant was a single Pheasant. And if I hadn’t stopped to look at a flock of buntings and finches then i would probably have walked past it as it exploded from quite close to my feet when I paused.
Yes, Whinchat caught out many people. I saw them on the Sunday (6 of them – my first ever for my patch), couldn’t find any on the Monday and then did find one on the Tuesday. There were probably a few around on every day.
My birding has been changed in the same way as yours through using Birdtrack on my local patch.
You won this teaser through some sensible choices. But I was really impressed by how good all the entries were – that says something about ornithological wisdom. Who would have thought that so many people would get very close to the answer when not knowing the site at all. There is a lot of information embedded in that list of 73 species.
And I was also impressed by the ‘wisdom of crowds’ aspect of it.