The spring is back in full swing, enabling us to listen and enjoy bird songs in our everyday lives. Nature provides us with this lovely soundtrack indicating that most migrant species are back from their wintering grounds, and majority of species are already in the middle of their breeding season, preparing to raise their chicks. Now is the ideal time of the year to contribute with your daily outings in an even more meaningful manner by collecting complete lists with breeding codes. These will be of huge importance to OBM (OpenBirdMaps), as well as European ones such as EBBA2 Live Farmland.
Invest your time to collect complete lists with breeding codes
By collecting complete lists, you are informing the portal managers not only about the species that were present but also about the species that were absent, a crucial part of information that is impossible to conclude with casual observations only. Similarly, by including the breeding bird atlas codes (you can find it in the OBM application), you are providing a new value for national atlases on breeding birds as these types of data are also commonly used to produce modelled maps (probability of occurrence of bird species). In general, complete lists provide much more information that can be further used in analyses for various scientific and conservation projects (e.g. graphs on phenology, Breeding Bird Atlases, EBBA2LiveFarmland, BirdFlu Radar).
How to start?
By simply making a conscious decision, before you start to observe birds, to report all birds that you see and hear and can identify during your outing (in a given place and time period), meaning that you are not omitting any bird species on purpose. Do not be discouraged by the fact that once you decide to make a complete list, suddenly some species that you are sure are living in that place are nowhere to be heard or seen. It is critical to remember that only very rarely all bird species present in a given place and time period will be detected even by the most skilled observers (e.g. some birds will always be completely quiet or out of sight), therefore, it’s perfectly normal for complete lists to only contain some of the species that are regularly seen in a given place and time period. Complete lists do usually require more attention than casual observations but investing just a bit more in your effort provides a much higher value to your data. So, just go for it!
Join us!
Join us in a regional challenge on May 10-11th across the region of SE Europe and follow how your observations contribute in real time to the amount of data collected and informing the phenology graphs of species at SEELists.
