The Lincolnshire Bird Club

I've been playing about with data from the Birdguides online rarity archive and generated a map of the distribution of Lincs BBRC rarities from 1960 to 2008. Using it I've generated another map to show the best place to live in Lincs for getting rare birds, especially by bike.

The answer turns out to be Huttoft. Follow this link to the BTO blog hosted on this website if you'd like to check it out.

http://btolincs.blogspot.com/

Good work Phil! No real surprises i guess, but the demise of Wisbeach is well illustrated and the rise of Frampton will no doubt feature in a few years time.

Hi all,
So us bikers better move there then,any good pubs there???
Roger.

Looking at the map,Barton hasn't done too bad over the years,so hold your horses Rog!.In the last ten years i have seen Arctic Roll,Lesser Scaup,Penduline Tit,White-winged Black Tern,Alpine Swift,Great-reed Warbler,Black-winged Stilt,Ferruginous Duck,Red-rumped Swallow to name but a few,mainly thanks to a certain eminant ornithologist. .


Steve.

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The data is however rather flawed Phil as it only includes apparently current BBRC species and so many species have been removed from 1960 - 2009 that the numbers of actual BBRC species recorded in the period concerned is a lot higher as an example it looks as if my square has 11 records but the following list shows there have been rather more than that with 32 below! -it is also seriously lacking in species from the Alkborough and Ferriby squares to name just 2 that I know well while a quick list for Killingholme pits would raise at least 8 rarities;

an interesting exercise though which could maybe be made more specific ie tetrad or even site / location specific
Barton square list:
Little Swift
Penduline Tit
Ring-necked Duck x 7
Lesser Scaup x2
Little Bittern
Whiskered Tern
White-winged Black Tern x2
Laughing Gull
Bonaparte's Gull
Green-winged Teal x3
Ferruginous Duck
Arctic Redpoll x2
Red-footed Falcon
Black-winged Stilt x4
pratincole sp
Red-rumped Swallow x2
Great Reed Warbler

Hi Graham

I don't think the data is flawed, although I accept it is a subset. As explained on the blog it is taken from Birdguides and only current BBRC rarities are included from 1960 to 2008. The map effectively indexes rarity occurence by reference to the presence of extreme rarities. This is the list of rarities for TA02 derived from Birdguides:

Whiskered Tern (Chlidonias hybrida) 2008
Great Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus arundinaceus) 2006
Black-winged Stilt (Himantopus himantopus) 2006
Lesser Scaup (Aythya affinis) 2004
Eurasian Penduline Tit (Remiz pendulinus) 2001
Little Swift (Apus affinis) 1998
Lesser Scaup (Aythya affinis) 1995
Black-winged Stilt (Himantopus himantopus) 1987
Laughing Gull (Larus atricilla) 1984
Great Snipe (Gallinago media) 1983

As you point out many of the species on your list are no longer BBRC rarities and some of them have turned up after the period. If you wanted to conduct a more complete exercise you would have to go through all BBRC reports from 1960 to 2008 to pick up the former rarity records. Then for species not included after being dropped from the rarities list you would have to go through every Lincs Bird Report for the same period to pick up records of those reclassified species. That would take a great deal of time and access to paper records I do not have. It would however be a valuable exercise from the Lincs point of view and whether anyone else, like yourself maybe? has collected the data over the years I do not know. Perhaps it is something we should be doing as a bird club.

Twenty species have been removed from the BBRC list since 2006 and many others going back to the 70s, it is difficult to see where you would draw the line, other than in the easiest place! unless you wanted to conduct a complete exercise. I guess that would mean including every species that has been classified as a BBRC rarity at anytime since 1960, or such other date one might choose.

I agree it would be interesting to do the data to tetrad but there are 2 main problems. Some birds have roved across many tetrads, though you could overcome this by pin pointing where they were first seen. The other problem is that I personally do not have sufficient knowledge of all records since 1960 to assign them to tetrad and published locations are often imprecise. This is a problem with the atlas too, especially for key sites that fall across a number of tetrads and also 10 km squares. The classic example is Freiston which lies across TF34 and TF44 with the line going straight through the lagoons.

Phil

Sorry if it came over at critical was not meant to be; I understand what you are saying re the removal of species and publication etc and this is the main problem with using BBRC criteria as a reflection of county rarity; what would maybe be more useful in a county context is to use all records that relate to species that have occurred a certain number of times in Lincs eg really rare<5 records, rare <20 records, scarce <50 all time records etc this would make more sense of things like Dartford Warbler that have never been a BBRC species but has occurred in Lincs just 3 times < Red-flanked Bluetail!

It is an exercise that I think can be expanded and produce some interesting results

Hi Graham

No worries, I got your point. You are absolutely right it would be much more interesting to do an exercise that relates purely to the absolute occurrence of all rare species in Lincs rather than rely on UK criteria. I'll start thinking about it, but again I do not have a full set of Bird Reports though The Birds of Lincs is a good starting point and its just a case of filling in the gaps back to there. I guess the LBC database would take us back to the late 90s, are you aware of any other good data sources that such an exercise could be based on?

Something I thought might be interesting to do at the end of the BTO atlas period i.e up to 31 July 2011 would be to take the ttv data from the atlas for Lincs and using the Bird Club database records for the same period, produce a complete list of all species occurring in Lincs in the period by relative abundance by month throughout an average calendar year. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has seen this done in another county and could point me towards a publication of such an exercise or is aware of another county planning to do it with the current atlas.