Berkshire Bird Atlas - a plea for help

23 June 2011 | Marek Walford

This article has been adapted from an email by Chris Robinson.

We need urgent help to "top up" the numbers of confirmed breeding records in many tetrads in the west of the county. Please take a look at the maps below which shows where the problem areas are (or were, as of late Sunday - there may have been some minor improvements since then). Could you help us by going to one or more of these sites and increasing their confirmed breeding totals? At this time of year there are many family groups or young birds evident (e.g: Tits, Finches, Robins and several others) which makes for an easy confirmation and many species are on their second round of breeding so parents carrying food is another confirmation sign. Depending on what's already been found a one to two hour walk around most squares should bring the total comfortably into the 20's. It's a really enjoyable and useful form of birding - please help us if you can!

You can find out the latest count for any tetrad by going to the BTO Atlas website and clicking on 'Any Square Summary'. Just select the tetrad(s) you are interested in and you will see a list of species recorded so far, together with their current breeding status (it's a good idea to print this for use in the field). Because other people will be concentrating on the west it's also vital that you enter your records as soon as you get home so that we do not duplicate effort. If you haven't already joined it, we have just set up an email (Yahoo) group where people are posting their survey plans and news of their updates. This is a good way to let others know that you are "on the case" - please mail berksbirdatlas-subscribe@yahoogroups.com to join.

Fig 1. Berks tetrads with less than 10 species confirmed 19th June

Fig 1. Berks tetrads with less than 20 species confirmed 19th June