the end of January...

....is upon us, and along with it comes the time to sum up how you've all been getting on with the first month of the Patchwork Challenge. Loads of you have submitted scores using the form on the right of the blog - for which we're very grateful, but if you haven't, it'll soon be time to! If you haven't used the form, it's very simple, and if you've done things correctly you should get a message saying that you've submitted your score.

We dont really have a cut off point for receiving scores - but if you want your score to feature in our round ups (here, some hype on twitter and facebook, and a monthly update on Birdguides) then the sooner the better! We'll leave the january scores form on the blog for about a week into February.

Also, to the folk who have joined up more recently, we need you to give us your comparative scores if you have them (the comparative score is, if you have it, the average score - in points, not species of birds - of your last two representative years on patch). You can enter your comparative score in column 'J' of the housekeeping spreadsheet. If you dont submit one to us we will assume that you dont have one....Although we can accept one at any point really...

And after that, it's back to the birding! Get back to your patches and start giving us your February scores as and whenever you want (and the February score form is up on the blog, of course!)

Remember, your February scores are the total number of points you have accrued so far for the year (i.e. Jan and Feb).

So, keep an eye out for the updates and see where your January birding has left you in the ranks!  

points/per/bird

There are 2 ways of accruing a high score - seeing a lot of birds, or finding high scoring birds, like the Gyrfalcon that recently graced an Askernish rooftop! (Don't forget, scarce birds worth three points are doubled if you find them, and rare birds worth 4 and 5 points are trebled if you are lucky enough to stumble across them).

One way of assessing the quality of a year list is to look at the points scored per bird (which is very simple to work out - simply divide the number of points by the number of species). My points per bird for the last two years are as follows:

2011 - 1.297

2012 - 1.380

Living by the coast, I'm lucky enough to get several easy 2 pointers every year, like kittiwakes, razorbill and the like. These are my bread and butter. The ones that really make a difference to the points per bird are the ones for which you get the finds bonuses (see above). 2012 was a much better year than 2011 for finds bonuses, with three 'finds' scoring me an extra 9 points. If someone else had found these birds my points per year would have been 1.313. If I hadn't seen them at all, it would have been a lowly  1.274.

You'd think that the best time to see these 'extra pointers' might be the spring and autumn - and if your patch was on the east coast like mine you'd probably be right. The graph below for 2012 shows a big peak in October (when I picked up YBW and barred, and saw a lovely but unfortunately second hand RBfly), but shows no real peak for my other 6 pointer (an April wryneck - probably as it would have been somewhat 'swamped' by the scoring of lots of 1 point birds in the form of common migrants). The blue line is the monthly 'ppb' with the red line representing the year end 'ppb'.

The points per bird graph for 2011 looks somewhat different though - a trough in October and peaks in August, and perhaps a little more surprising, March. Just goes to show that it's worth getting out there at all times of year - you might find yourself scoring very valuable points at a time when you least expect it!

And thats enough of the graphs for now...

Patch of the Day, Millise, David McCormick

I went to my patch today 11th January 2013, which is a long coastal site in Millise, Co Down, Northern Ireland. I started at a place called Drumfad Bay, an area of coastal plants (mostly sea mayweed, scurvygrass and sea radish and some other wildplants), sand beach and rocky areas. I have been here before so had an idea of what to expect. I arrived at 1:15pm and it was cloudy and a cool 6C. When I arrived, the first thing I noticed was a pied wagtail wandering around a lot of seaweed (which there are masses of here right along the coast). 

The tide was out so walked down the beach near the sea and the first thing I saw here was a Cormorant and a male Eider offshore. Next started walking up the beach north to Millisle Beach which is not that far further up the coast. As I started walking I saw 3 other Cormorant offshore flying past and 35 Oystercatcher which were the most numerous bird other than gulls, I saw a total of around 100 during the walk from Drumfad Bay to the end of Millisle Beach. I then saw 3 curlew flying over, a favorite coastal bird of mine.

As I walked along, notice my feet were starting to feel wet as tide was beginning to come in, so had to move on. Before I got to the end of Drumfad bay I saw a total of:

35 Oystercatcher

3 Curlew

3 Cormorant

8 Herring Gull

1 Eider (Male)

5 Redshank

2 Pied Wagtail

12 Black-Headed Gull

6 Rooks (4 flying south from woodland across the road and 2 feeding in among seaweed).

By this time it was 2:10pm and moved toward Millisle Beach, a long beach full of sand and seaweed and a long carpark beside it with a church and houses near the end of it. People walk their dogs here but that didn't stop me seeing any birds. At the north end of this beach is a small area of loads of seaweed piled up (small enclosed beach between a paved path and a stone wall) and it usually has pipits, starlings, redshank and the odd gull here). It was trying to rain at this time when I left Drumfad Bay, but I did manage to see a lot here with a total of:

65 Oystercatcher

53 Herring Gull

16 Rooks (mostly feeding around seaweed piles)

4 Pied Wagtail

11 Starling (most feeding on large seaweed piles at the north end of the beach)

1 Rock Pipit (usually see a few here, this was feeding on large seaweed piles at the north end of the beach)

1 Meadow Pipit (usually find quite a number here and like rock pipit, was feeding on large seaweed piles at the north end of the beach)

10 Common Gulls

10 Black-Headed Gull

And at the sea edge and at a grassy area near a community garden with swings and slides etc... for kids, there was 41 Pale-Bellied Brent which was less than I have seen here before in December. Back in December I was recording numbers around 80+, so there seems to be a drop in numbers.

I didn't expect to see anything unusual and after all the times I have been here in the past, have yet to see an unusual, scare or rare bird here, but I am not ruling the possibility of finding any in future so for now my score seems pretty low. I have a video I took of the area in November, which you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmsYiQqV3DE

OoO – but still working...........

For the next week or so, up to the end of the month both Mark and myself will be away from home (and our patches!!) so we may be a wee bit slow replying to emails etc so please bear with us as we try and keep up as the first month draws to a close.

Over the next few days we (Mark) will be posting a few short posts outlining a few developments, reminding people to post their end of month scores and sending in your best sightings of the month etc so please keep checking the blog and twitter for any updates.

Have a great end to the month everyone, I’m off to The Gambia to get some sun and see some birds, while Mark is off to the North Sea to count kittiwakes and fulmars, I think I know where I’d rather be!

Charting your progress...

When you're as geeky as me, you can do this....

These graphs chart my progress through 2013 compared to the two previous years (i.e. the ones that contribute to my average). As you can see, I'm doing alright. The broad green line represents in a) number of species this year, and in b) the number of points I've accrued. I've already seen the same number of species and I'm only a few points behind the totals for 2012, so ahead of my average: not that this matters one bit at this stage though!

The only reason this has any importance to me is that I'll be away for a wee bit of February, so there'll be a few weeks off patch. In which case, its good to get a wee bit ahead of yourself....

Patch of the day - Foreness point, Barry Hunt

I moved to Cliftonville almost exactly three years ago after spending 25 years of local patch birding at Reculver/Minnis Bay just 20 miles further along the coast. The patch is indeed local to my home and I can be birding in the area within ten minutes of leaving home on foot.

The area is situated at the extreme north east tip of Kent and is on a true headland, which lies where the North Sea and English Channel merge and it is serviced by the North Foreland Lighthouse, the presence of a Lighthouse always reminds me of a good birding area and I’m rather fond of them too. A lot of the areas here are on the private grounds of the North Foreland Golf Course which is rather annoying really as there is lots of decent habitat that you just cannot get into to cover. The coastal chalk cliffs are not that high and they stretch right around the coast in the area covered, although there are several small beautiful sandy bays that are very popular in the summer months with tourists.  Taking things away from the coast we head inland to Northdown Park, a large park with many mature trees and famous for a large population of Ring-necked Parakeets, it has attracted some good migrants over the years and thankfully it fits nicely into the patch challenge parameters. The rest of the area is taken up with a very large housing development and is virtually a non birding zone. There is no fresh water here and no marshy habitat so some species are very scarce Moorhen and Coot spring to mind and the dabbling ducks are usually restricted to seawatches.

With nearly 40 years of records from the area it has the kudos of producing just over 300 species of bird and in drift migration conditions it can produce significant falls of Continental migrants which seem to avoid other Kent coastal areas. Some really good birds have been recorded here and they include Collared Flycatcher, Trumpeter Finch, Pied Wheatear, Desert Wheatear and Eastern Black Redstart, along with many sightings of the scarcer drift migrants such as Icterine Warbler, Richard’s Pipit and Wryneck. Epic tales abound and any area that can produce 3 Pallas’s Warblers in the same tree and an arrival of 5 Red-breasted Flycatchers must surely be worth scrutiny.

To sum the area up it is still capable of throwing up some real quality birding but the habitat loss and the ever growing pressure of the general public and their activities has made the whole birding experience here a little stale at times.

Good luck to all in the 2013 Patch Challenge,

Barry Hunt.

Using your BirdTrack data – Hemsby sea watching (sometimes sofa sea watching!)

I’m sure you have all became very familiar with entering your patchwork data onto BirdTrack by now, but how much time have you spent looking at what you have submitted?  So far this year I have submitted 186 records, 13 complete lists and 55 species from my patch. Which is handy as it’s the same number of species on my excel scoresheet! Many of these have been from sea watches (sofa sea watching is definitely the way forward when you reach early morning temperatures of -9°C) so I will concentrate on some seabirds here.

It has been relatively quiet so far but I’m still a wee bit surprised to see that I have only recorded 23 species while sea watching so far, even though sea watches constitute 112 out of my 186 records and all 13 of my complete lists! Comparing this to my 2012 BirdTrack data (August-December) where I recorded 676 records, 25 complete lists and 51 species, it means I have still plenty of seabirds to catch up with later in the year.

There is no surprise with the species that I have recorded on 100% of my complete lists, herring, common and black-headed gulls with red-throated divers next at 92.3%. I always thought that cormorants area regular sight everyday but in fact I have ‘only’ recorded them on just over three quarters of my sea watches.

Species	2013 %	2012 %
Black-headed Gull	100	88
Common Gull	100	48
Herring Gull	100	100
Red-throated Diver	92.3	80
Cormorant	76.9	80
Great Black-backed Gull	76.9	76
Common Scoter	61.5	76
Shelduck	46.2	16
Brent Goose	30.8	44
Wigeon	23.1	44
Fulmar	15.4	12
Gannet	15.4	68
Great Crested Grebe	15.4	24
Curlew	7.7	4
Dunlin	7.7	N/A
Eider	7.7	12
Guillemot	7.7	64
Kittiwake	7.7	48
Lesser Black-backed Gull	7.7	20
Little Auk	7.7	4
Mallard	7.7	16
Shoveler	7.7	16
Velvet Scoter	7.7	4
[unidentified auk]	7.7	28
[unidentified diver]	7.7	8

Again there is no real surprise with the most common duck seen, common scoter (61.5%) but rather more unusually shelduck is the next most common duck with 46.2% while I have had the same amount of records of mallard, eider and shoveler as I have of velvet scoter (7.7%).



Sea watching in Hemsby



 

 

 

 

A strange omission from the list so far in 2013 is teal, normally a pretty regular sight on sea watches, perhaps this cold snap will shake things up a bit.

Below are a couple tables, again using the BirdTrack data but this time looking at the actual numbers of birds I have recorded on my patch during sea watches. First are the 20 most abundant species, although second place in 2012 belongs to ‘commic’ terns, mainly due to my laziness but also on one day I had over 1500 fly past in one hour!!

Top 10 Species (2013)	Count
Cormorant	2006
Red-throated Diver	317
Black-headed Gull	188
Common Scoter	84
Brent Goose	55
Common Gull	51
Shelduck	45
Great Black-backed Gull*	20
Herring Gull*	16
Wigeon	12

Top 20 Species (2012)	Count
Cormorant	3453
"Commic" Tern	2626
Gannet	2218
Common Scoter	1669
Red-throated Diver	1209
Kittiwake	502
Wigeon	486
Teal	400
Brent Goose	321
Guillemot	298
Black-headed Gull*	266
Little Tern	254
Sandwich Tern	143
Common Tern	110
Eider	97
Mediterranean Gull	60
Little Gull	51
Arctic Skua	40
Shelduck	30
Dunlin	25

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*These figures are skewed as I didn’t always make counts for the gull species and in 2012 I didn't make any counts for common, herring, LBB and GBB gulls.

I then looked at what was hard to see and rare on patch during my sea watches.

Bottom 10 species (2013)	Count
Curlew	1
Guillemot	1
Kittiwake	1
Lesser Black-backed Gull	1
Little Auk	1
Velvet Scoter	1
Fulmar	2
Shoveler	2
Gannet	3
Great Crested Grebe	4

Bottom 20 Species (2012)	Count
Little Auk	1
Manx Shearwater	1
Puffin	1
Curlew	2
Pomarine Skua	2
Slavonian Grebe	2
Sooty Shearwater	2
Grey Phalarope	3
Red-breasted Merganser	3
Arctic Tern	4
Great Northern Diver	4
Great Skua	4
Tufted Duck	4
Velvet Scoter	4
Fulmar	5
Scaup	5
Shag	5
Goldeneye	9
Shoveler	11
Great Crested Grebe	12

Anyway, enough of this waffling and geekery, I will leave it to yourselves to find out the delights and geeky facts that are hidden within your data on BirdTrack!

http://blx1.bto.org/birdtrack/