What to do if you want to take part...

Here's a quick refresher on the three things you need to do....apologies for the laziness, this is an email I've sent out to a few folk but theres no point in not putting it up here as it's pretty helpful!

First, read this and make sure we've explained the rules properly

http://patchworkchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/what-is-patchwork-challenge.html

Next, read this and fill out the spreadsheet in the link...

http://patchworkchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/housekeeping.html

Once that is done, download your 'scorecard' here

http://patchworkchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/how-to-get-most-out-of-your-scoring.html

If you have a comparative score (i.e. past 2 year lists from the patch) you can stick them into copies of the scorecard and average them to come up with your comparative score. If, like you say, you're averages are unrealistic, then just post what you reckon will be a realistic score.

A word of warning, the scorecard does not like apostrophes - if you have any problems entering particular birds you can select them from the dropdown menu or copy and past them in from the 'list' tab of the spreadsheet.

If you want to make a map to send in, or are concerned that your patch may be too large, there are some great mapping tools here

http://patchworkchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/theres-been-plenty-of-interest-in-this.html

If you have any issues drop us a line....

Good luck with the patches!

Norfolk - a mini league in the making?

This post is the first in a series as we start to introduce the patches to everyone. I thought I would start with the Norfolk patches for two reasons, firstly my patch is there and secondly 16 of the first 70 patches are from there. Now, I know what your thinking and that all the patches are from North Norfolk 'hot spots' but in truth there is a good mix of north and east coast patches as well as a few inland ones. We'll start in the north, Salthouse, Gramborough Hill, Felbrigg and Cromer all covered but no patches to the west of the north coast yet. Below are the patches of Salthouse and Cromer.


Cromer local patch

Salthouse local patch

The east coast is well represented with six entrants, although it only constitutes 3 patches. The Winterton collective have stuck to their parish which measured in just under the maximum allowed and there will be up to four of them competing there. Neighbouring either side of their patch will be a Sea Paling patch and my patch at Hemsby. The Winterton and Sea Palling patches are below, see the first post for the Hemsby patch.



Winterton local patch



Sea Palling local patch

And finally we have six inland patches, Thetford, Whitlingham CP, UEA, Thorpe Marshes, Syderstone and Mid-Yare. All are pretty varied and should have totally differnet lists, some relying on fresh water lakes and rivers and others on woodland, heaths and farmland. See the Whitlingham and Mid-Yare patches below.

Whitlingham CP local patch

Mid-Yare local patch

 So thats Norfolk for the moment but I'm sure there will be a few more patches before the months out.

How to get the most out of your scoring spreadsheet

Follow this link to get your hands on the Patchwork Challenge official scoring spreadsheet! If that doesn't work there are details at the bottom of this post....

You'll need your own version of this so when it is open, click file and select download...and save it somewhere!

The spreadsheet is dead easy to use. When January 1st comes, all you need to do is enter the birds you see in the 'Spp" column, as and when you see them, along with the date. The spreadsheet will add the values for each species. When you are lucky enough to find a species worth three points or more, put an 'F' in the find column.

The magical spreadsheet will then calculate the number of species you've seen and the number of points you've accumulated. Beware that the spreadsheet gets a little lippy when you enter something incorrectly spelled...there is a 'list' tab where you can look things up if needs be....but dont alter anything on the list page as you will mess up the innards of the spreadsheet and that will make our secret spreadsheet guru very upset ( although if you just downloaded it again he would never know....).

As you enter your list, you'll see your points and total growing in the box to the right of the columns (at the top of the spreadsheet). Once it's downloaded and saved, have a little play around to get the hang of things....anything you put in now can be deleted before January 1st.

For those of you with previous years lists....you'll need a comparative score to 'play against' You can copy the spreadsheet as many times as you like, and put past years lists in it (remembering to fill in the find column, but dont worry about the dates...that wont matter). If you only have a score for this year thats fine, but if you have scores going back even further take an average of the last 2 years for your comparative score.

So there you have it. Once you have downloaded the spreadsheet, and filled out the housekeeping spreadsheet, you are ready to patch! Go for it!

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B5XpreEuDAzzdlNsVVpBcGF1RTA

Patch of the day - Howick, Stewart Sexton

In what we hope to make a regular feature, Stewart Sexton describes his local patch, Howick, in Northumberland. Cheers Stewart!

We moved to the village of Howick in the spring of 2009. Its rural, east coast location and chocolate box image were not least when it came to the decision of ‘should we move house’. 

The village consists of 18 houses, 1 village hall, 4 street lights and a phone box, set about 300mtrs from the scenic Northumberland coast. This east coast location, with Lord Howick’s estate with arboretum, pond, meadows, ditches and rougher areas make it an excellent local patch for any birder. The ability to walk for five minutes to a seawatch carrying full kit and deckchair will always be a novelty that I hope I will never get used to.

When we moved, a little investigation did turn up some bird finding potential here.

For example, in May 1886 a summer plumaged male Little Bittern was found. It was suspected that he had a mate but breeding was never proven. In 1890 a Night Heron spent 3 weeks at Howick Hall and in May 1874 the county’s first Squacco Heron was shot in mistake for an owl. A nice trio of herons there, and I still need Little Bittern in the UK.

Since historical times, though, the area has had very little birding coverage. This spot is not really birder friendly ( just how we like it) and its avian inhabitants do not give themselves up easily. There are no reserves, hides, true headlands, large freshwater lakes, reservoirs or estuaries. There aren’t any real ‘birdy’ attractions at all, so most Northumberland birders drive from the south straight past and on to the hotspots of Low Newton, Budle Bay or Holy Island in the north. All sites with a good track record, that would easily put Howick in the shade.

So then, what is the birding really like?

The patch can be roughly split into three habitat types and locations, covering around 2.5 km squares on the OS map. They are - the Village and environs, the coast and sea and the woods, fields and pond just inland.

I can sample all, on foot from home, in an hour and return with a reasonably varied list of species. A fuller coverage might take 3 or 4 hours when there is some migrant grounding weather or in a hard winter.

My full list since 2009 is 190 species plus a Turtle Dove seen well by my neighbour and a few others seen prior to this ( a White billed Diver I found in 2008 at Boulmer was seen to fly close past here later the same day).

Personal highlights for me include a singing male Golden Oriole, successfully twitched by several others that spent only one morning in our village wood in June 2009, May 2010 brought me a, brown, singing male Common Rosefinch, not only on to the patch but into our garden where it shared a niger feeder with goldfinches. Again, a one day bird. The garden came up trumps again with Barred Warblers in 2010 and 2012, and living in the patch has paid real dividends with garden records of Hobby, Osprey, Quail  in 3 years out of 4, Ring Ouzel and Black Redstart.

Yellow browed Warbler has been recorded twice, as you might expect on the east coast and Waxwing in 3 out of 4 years so far, peaking at 143 birds in November 2012.

Seawatching is not as good as at some other local headlands, but it is ok, with all four skuas, three divers, annual Roseate Terns, Little Auks and, last year, a great passage of Storm Petrels in the summer. 

There are some downsides. We only have one small fish pond. It has a pair of Mute Swans, a few Moorhen and Mallard, Little Grebe, but little else. Wader habitat is none existent despite the coastal location. The whole patch shore is rocky. The farmland is mixed but quite intensive, but I suppose you can’t have it all. It’s not Minsmere!

As for other wildlife, that’s quite good too. Moth Trapping has turned up over 400 species, we have Red Squirrels, Brown Hares and Grey Seals. Occasionally Bottle nosed Dolphins and Harbour Porpoise make an appearance offshore.  

Lets hope I can add some new species during 2013. Wryneck would be top of my ‘most wanted’…

Stewart Sexton

Howick

www.boulmerbirder.blogspot.com

@stewchat 

Housekeeping

Things are really picking up pace with the patchwork challenge now. We're applying the last few tweaks to the spreadsheet, so soon it should be available. We were going to email it to everyone, but that seems far too much like hard work, so instead we'll put a link on the blog and keep you all posted as to when it has gone up.

In the meantime can we trouble you for a few minutes of your time? To make things a little easier for us, it would be grand if you could help us with a bit of 'personal patch' info...

In the spreadsheet (URL is at the bottom of the post in case there are issues with the link) would you be able to update any of the first three columns with any details we may have missed?

We could also do with some info in the following columns...

If your patch is inland, stick a Y in the inland column.

If you have a blog/website you'd like us to provide a link for, please paste an address in the appropriate cell.

If you will be able to post a comparative score (i.e. an average score from the 2 previous years please place a Y in the comparative score column - when we have put the  scoring spreadsheet up it can be updated again with the score.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApXpreEuDAzzdHRtQUhyVUwyVmU1NXdYT1FYOFFCMUE

Who are we?

So, who are the crazy people organising this challenge? Well to be honest we were expecting a maximum of 20 patches and thought "ah, it'll be easy to organise". So here we are less than a week after starting up and the number of patches is 55 and growing! We've both been involved in competitive patching for a few years, each with slightly different rules. We decided we wanted to try and make a national competition and combined the rules. So here we are:

Mark Lewis (aka Fat Paul Scholes)

I've been birding for as long as I can remember. I started when I was about 5, because my dad took it up, and when you're 5, whatever your dad does is cool. If only I'd known....

I birded around Durham (with frequent visits to the Tees marshes, Hartlepool, and the Northumberland coast) until the age of 18, at which point I decided to spend a couple of years wasting time and money getting kicked out of Aberdeen university for never turning up. Aberdeen has got a 24 hour pie shop though so I decided to hang around. I've now spent almost as much of my life up here as I did down south, and apart from a few weeks each year birding on Ouessant (Brittany) and Sanday (Orkney), I pretty much do all of my birding at Girdle ness. I also work in an office that is on-patch so can frequently be found looking out of the window. At least I turn up now...

Ryan Irvine (aka ....... Ryan!)

Been birding for 25 years but only got seriously in to birding at Uni where I spent 4 years with the infamous Aberdeen Uni Bird Club, where I met FPS. Since then I have moved around working for the RSPB and such like in Edinburgh, North Wales and Cornwall before settling down in East Anglia for the past 4 years and finding my patch at Hemsby. Hemsby borders the more famous site of Winterton (black lark fame) but is a prime east coast site where very few birders visit.

I'm also the person to blame for the points system we use but in my defence I felt that a self found OBP deserved more than a twitched robin, hence the birdguides and finds system of scoring. My strategy for the competiton is pretty awful to be honest with most of the peak period of autumn normally spent in a wee village in Shetland, so the chances of me winning are pretty slim!

So there we are, two geeky birders becoming slightly more geeky and Mark is probably gone over and beyond geekiness in his last post!

My multicoloured spreadsheet

WARNING - the text below contains levels of geekiness that some readers will find offensive and all readers will find boring.

I’ve been actively keeping a patch list for 5 years now, although it was only recently that I decided to keep it all in my amazing multicolured spreadsheet. This is different from the ‘Patchwork’ spreadsheet (that contenders have received, or will receive soon) in that it doesn’t calculate any scores. Instead, it allows me to compare the ‘anatomy’ of each year’s list,  noting how many species I see every year, which species I’ve seen in one year, two years, three years etc, and showing which months have been most productive.

Over the course of the last five years I’ve averaged 127.2 species per year (assuming I finish on what I’m on now). This is a little lower than perhaps it should be as for the first few years I posted relatively low scores due to the fact that I lived a 45 minute walk away, rather than the 3 minute walk I have these days (….that house move was no coincidence by the way). So, for the sake of argument I’ll say that my average is 130 spp/year.

Of these 130, the vast majority, over 90, are birds I see every year. These ‘boring’ birds get a boring grey highlight on the spreadsheet, but include some species that could well be missed – eg redstart and black guillemot (tystie is not common up here at all). So of these 90+, perhaps 80 are totally guaranteed.

Pinky red birds are birds I’ve missed on one year out of the five years. Essentially, I see these birds as ‘grey’ species that I’ve managed to miss by being rubbish, or, in the example of barnacle goose this year, being away from home during the peak passage period. The blue birds are ones I’ve missed twice, green the ones I’ve missed three times (probably more sensible to think of them as rarer birds I’ve seen twice), and the peachy birds are ones that I’ve only recorded on one year. This is what it looks like at the business end...

You’d expect the peach and green species to be the rarest birds, but there’s plenty in there that only a patch birder could get enthusiastic about – little grebe, bullfinch, stock dove, coal tit for example, sitting nicely alongside desert wheatear, white-billed diver and surf scoter. One thing that surprised me initially is that the peach zone is bigger than the green zone. The peach birds are the rarest birds on the patch, but the pool of potential new species is much larger than the pool of potential second records, hence more single record birds.  The screengrab below shows the full set of 1, 2, 3, 4 and every year birds - look at the gulf in quality in the right hand column...!      

As well as giving me something to do while the missus is watching Eastenders, my amazing technicolour spreadsheet allows me to target certain species – which grey, red and blue species I need and have a chance of seeing, etc. It also gives me a chance to work up some pretty pointless graphs, the likes of which I will show you below.....

I have to warn you that there is nothing earth shattering coming up....

 The graph above shows the accumulation of species per month. It will surprise no-one that apart from January of course, the largest gains are made in spring and autumn. What this doesn't show is that May perhaps is not the most valuable month...most of the birds seen in May are common migrants that would easily be seen at any point during the summer and autumn. This year, despite being away for a week at the beginning of the month, October has been the most valuable month in terms of adding the most 'unusual' species...

October has also been the best month in terms of point scoring. Two 6 pointers (yellow-browed and barred warblers self found) as well as RBfly (3 points, found by 'the other guy'), and a few 2 pointers.

So, stop the press, October is good for birds in general, and especially finding rarer birds. I did warn you not to expect too much!

I should make it clear that this level of geekery is not necessary to take part in the competition - the spreadsheet we'll send you is as simple as adding species to a list, some fancy lookup queries do the rest. It would be reassuring to know that I'm not the only one out there who does this sort of thing. Please, now I've come out as the geekiest type of patch geek, I need some support. Anyone else have a multicoloured spreadsheet?

.....no?

....oh...