Wednesday 16 January 2013

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/

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