Standing up for Nature
I’m a big fan of the Breeding Bird Survey – I describe it and comment on it in Chapter 2 of Reflections. I’m also a participant but even if I weren’t then I’d be poring over the annual report as soon as I could each year. And so I had my first look at the…
The latest excellent BBS (and WBBS) report arrived through my letterbox last week. It’s a concise and beautiful report which is a model of comprehensible summary of somewhat complex data. If you want to know how a wide variety of commoner and widespread birds are faring in the UK, and often in individual nations or…
Last weekend I did the second visit to one of my BBS squares. It was later in the allowable time than usual because everything has been later than usual for a while in my life. I wasn’t very optimistic about seeing lots of birds but the aim of the BBS is to record the birds…
It was a bit of a dull day when I did my first visit to one of my two Breeding Bird Survey squares – the sun came out a bit later. But an early morning stroll recording birds cannot ever be dull, can it? I was hopeful that I might add Cattle gret to the…
I told you, as I usually do, about my visits to my two Breeding Bird Survey squares (see here and here). Having done the surveys and entered the data online I thought I was done but those nice people in BTO HQ wanted to wring a little more from my volunteer effort because I had…
Last week I revisited ‘my’ two Breeding Bird Survey squares to carry out the second surveys at each to complete the data collection for 2021. BBS1, as I shall call it, is arable farmland and I have now completed 17 years of surveying it for the national scheme, and BBS2 is mostly farmland by the…
And so this report is different, maybe refreshingly so (just because everyone likes a change now and again) and has fewer trends (because they can’t be calculated reliably) and more reflection. I like reflection. I was quite surprised that in England there were as many as 1757 BBS squares covered compared with 2934 in 2019,…
Last weekend, the May Bank Holiday weekend, it was back to normal and I made my first visits to ‘my’ two BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey squares in the Northants countryside. Let’s call the two sites BBS1 and BBS2. Actually, when I say back to normal, there is no such thing as a normal Spring as…
I was out of the house at 05:40 this morning to do the Late visit to my other BBS square. There were a few drops of rain, hardly any, but the sky was dark enough to make me wonder whether this afternoon’s forecast thunder storms might arrive early – they didn’t, and they still haven’t…
It’s nearly time for me to carry out the ‘late’ bird survey on my other BBS square. I wonder what I’ll find. I’m one of the BBS recorders who notes mammals as well as birds on my transect walks. I don’t see much, but the occasional Brown Hare or Rabbit is added to the recording…