BTO Atlas

From November 2007 the BTO will be embarking upon a five year Atlas project. This will aim to produce maps of distribution and relative abundance for all bird species breeding and wintering in Britain. To do this there are two core methods – Roving Records which is best described as whatever you see, whenever, wherever! Everyone can take part in providing Roving Records. Data can be submitted on paper or, preferably, online. The results from these will provide data towards the distribution maps and are a means to accumulate evidence of breeding, and records of nocturnal species. Roving Recorder forms will be available for download from the BTO website or from me.

The second core method is Timed Tetrad Visits. (A tetrad being a 2km x 2km square.) Timed Tetrad Visits are concerned with discovering the broad patterns of relative abundance by counting birds for fixed periods of time in tetrads. This involves 2 visits per breeding or wintering season. You would plan a route to cover the range of habitats present in the tetrad and spend an hour counting the birds encountered – sight and sound. There is the provision to continue for a second hour and also to enter any species encountered after that second hour – you may choose to spend further time looking for evidence of breeding or to list additional species. The basic coverage for every 10km square in Britain is 8 tetrads. In Kent we have decided to go for complete coverage – ie 25 tetrads in every 10km square in order to make the data that much more complete for analysis within the county.

If you would like to survey a tetrad please contact me – if you do a BBS square you might like to take on the tetrad that contains that square (the two surveys will need to be completed separately as the methods are very different). You may wish to visit a completely different area. You can take on several tetrads if you wish. We would be particularly glad to have the same surveyor working the same tetrad in Summer and Winter as this will give a valuable extra dimension to the information.

This is your chance to get involved in probably the most important bird project for a decade.

Further details are available from the BTO website.

My contact details:  01304 612425, sally.hunter@tesco.net or The Willows Sandown Road Sandwich CT13 9NY.