Last week I completed my second visit to my second BBS square. It was a pretty standard, slightly quiet visit. But one can only record the birds in front of you and I think I did that pretty diligently.
I’ve been surveying this square in east Northants since 2012 and it was surveyed by somebody else from 2004-10.
In my eight surveys, 2019 produced the fewest species: 37 compared with 39-50 in previous years. I don’t think we should read anything into that.
And, in fact, I added a species to the overall list this year, and on Friday’s visit. It was a sufficiently unusual bird that it is not listed on the standard list of 240 species codes for the BBS. I had to search for a while to find out what the code was. It isn’t listed here on the BTO website. Now don’t get too excited – this is a bird I see often on my local patch and hardly a week goes by without them being reported in Northants. If I tell you that its BTO species code is a slightly non-intuitive HW then I doubt that many of you outside of Thetford will immediately know what it was but you can look it up here.
Or I could just tell you that it was a Great (White) Egret which simply flew up the valley of the River Nene in a southwesterly direction.
That was the ‘highlight’of the visit in a way, but I enjoyed spending a few moments watching a Wren singing and noticing his cocked tail wagging slightly from side to side as he belted out his song. And the number of Brown Hares recorded was pretty good too and I watched them for a while.
Anyway, that’s BBS done on both my squares and all the data entered for another year and I also spent several hours over the weekend entering the data for the English Winter Farmland Bird surveys which I did on these same squares back in the winter. I have a feeling I may have been more diligent than some others since I’ve now received an email from the BTO extending the deadline for the winter data to the end of July – that can only mean that they are worried that there are many missing data. Anyway, I feel I’ve done my bit for the BTO recently.
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