Bird Tracking

When listing is more than just an indulgence

This ‘Bio Listing’ lark. Birding. Mammal spotting. Botanising. Whatever it is you do. It’s all just a jolly, right? A bit of fun, a competition: a bunch of geeks, showing off what we know. Maybe so, though it’s not like there’s anything wrong with enjoying yourself. Everybody is out for a good time: who can blame us?

But luckily for our consciences (and our egos), it just so happens that you can make (wait for the pun) your listing count. Oh yes. There are ways without end to share your biological records with somebody else who would like to know, and perhaps even with a scientist who will crunch the numbers and make some sense of it all. From big, annual projects like the Big Garden Birdwatch or Big Butterfly Count, or the less well known Moth Night, to year-round efforts such as BTO’s Garden Birdwatch or, indeed, recording schemes for any organism you could care to imagine, which I’ve no doubt would welcome ‘amateur’ records : see http://www.brc.ac.uk/recording_schemes.asp.

These might be familiar. I’m sure all are worth your involvement. But plug of the day is for the increasingly excellent Bird Track site, run by the BTO. I don’t use it nearly as often as that excellence deserves. Used well, it not only makes use of your birding but will give back – encouraging you to go out and bird even more, especially at local sites that may be under watched by others. The ‘Explore my Records’ feature enables you to see your sightings portrayed on a table, graph or map, filtered by date, location or species, and export data to a spreadsheet. You can compare year lists, generate graphs that show a species’ recording rate changing through the year, view spring arrival dates for swallows and other seasonal indicators. And all those records from thousands of birders, taken together, makes for an enormously useful data set that, as the name suggests, tracks birds in real time.

I should be making the most of its wonders – and if you bird, so should you. So let’s resolve together to make 2012 the year of Bird Tracking. I’ll be aiming to submit at least three complete lists a week (when you enter every species you saw at a particular site, along with start and end times to give an indication of effort – the most useful records for analysis), which will blow my previous recording rates out of the water. And coming back full circle, will lead to an awful lot of pleasing graph- and map-based opportunities for bird-nerdery by the end of the year. Win-win!