To count or not to count

26 March 2012

I read a number of birding blogs as well as writing this one very so often.  One of the blogs I read is from Fleetwood Birder.  He regularly says he visits his feeding station and when he does he counts the number and species of birds that visit it.  I sit here reading those figures and marvel at them.  But always at the back of my mind is the thought that the Mighty Fleetwood Birder hasn’t really seen 197 tree sparrows in one birding session.  Now don’t get me wrong here my fellow birders.  I’m not saying that MFB is telling porkies … oh no, certainly not!  What I am thinking and therefore saying is that MFB is actually counting the number of visits to his feeding station by tree sparrows, rather than individual birds. 

Before we had to move back here to Dorktown 3 years ago we used to live in Atherton, Manchester.  We were only a couple of miles from Pennington Flash and would go for birding session down there fairly often.  But I noticed that as we sat in one particular hide where the feeding station was, I would see a bird come to a feeder, grab a nut or seed and fly off.  I watched where he would go and saw him sit on a branch or twig before returning to the feeder again.  Now that counts as two visits, not two birds.  See what I mean? 

I’ve been thinking about all this for some time now and in this morning’s post there’s a copy of a new magazine published the BTO called Volunteer – and guesses what one of the articles is about – yes, counting birds.  Having read it I’m still not sure about how it works.  The   writer speaks of how important it is count the birds we see while out birding.  Fine if you are at a reserve and can count all the black headed gulls you can see from each hide or as you walk along the paths.  But I would suggest that counting visits to bird feeding station is not all that accurate. 

Another issue along these lines is the surveys that BTO does.  Jan and I agreed to take part in   survey of tawny owls a few years.  We were given two tetrads to cover which where a good way out from our home but still in Warwickshire.  That’s no problem.  During our survey period we actually went to the two tetrads a lot more often than we expected to.  Sadly we didn’t find any tawny owls.  When I phoned the results in a comment was made about tawny owls being in trouble in our county.  But were/are they?  At the same time as we were doing our survey our son who lived not far from birding site in our town said her saw them on a regular basis at that site.  And there lies another problem for BTO – the lack of volunteers, hence the reason for the new mag methinks.  Sadly we can’t do any surveys now because of continued ill health, which is doubly sad because even though we didn’t hear our target bird, we still enjoyed being out and about.

 
So I don’t fully understand how counting visits to a feeding station can equate to counting actual individual birds, but keep at it MFB – you are doing a great job by the sounds of it!              


Here's a photo of a pied wagtail taken in Dorktown town centre - the town is not toally devoid of beauty I suppose.