Keep them coming!

There's been plenty of interest in this so far, with well over 20 patches submitted in the first few days and hopefully plenty more to come. Thanks to everyone who's signed up so far, we hope it proves to be a fun experience.

Thanks also to everyone who has sent maps of their patches in. This isn't essential but we may well use them in future and a map of your patch might be a useful thing to have if we ask you to contribute a guest blog when you find that azure tit.....if you want to create a map, the following links have been used by other patchers....

http://www.freemaptools.com/area-calculator.htm

http://www.earthpoint.us/Shapes.aspx

If you look over to the right you will also see that we've added a link to Birdtrack (well, Ryan has added it but I will try to take some of the credit...). It's not essential to the competition but we think it would be brilliant to contribute some data to this fantastic project. Not only will your records have some value, you will also be able to create all sorts of graphs and the like. That sort of thing is very appealing to a patch geek like me...

In the not too distant future there will be a much more informative post about Birdtrack, but in the meantime, follow the link and have a look round, and sign up your patch!

Good birding!