Tweeters...
Some of my favorite posts to see are those reporting the results of regular
surveys at a single site. Several Tweeters revisit locations on a regular basis
and count the birds encountered. Occasionally I have reported results of my own
waterbird surveys at East Bay in Olympia.
Repeated censuses can be a terrific way to become more familiar with bird
identification, timing of migrations, intra-seasonal movements, habitat-use
patterns, etc. People build incredible knowledge by "adopting" sites and
studying "their" birds on a regular basis.
These periodic surveys can be useful on a broad scale, too, if they fit into a
system. Breeding Bird Atlases, Breeding Bird Surveys, Breeding Bird Censuses,
Project Feederwatch, Christmas Bird Counts, North American Migration Counts,
and other organized monitoring efforts require participants to follow a few (or
many) rules so their findings are more readily and reliably comparable.
People involved with these programs learn a lot about birds and contribute to
a database that might return something to the birds through a collective and
increased knowledge of bird populations and their conservation needs.
Okay, who's still with me?
Grebes, scoters, goldeneyes, mergansers, and the rest of our region's
wintering waterbirds have recently started to work their way south into Puget
Sound. Using a simple protocol, Tweeters can track the movement of these
waterbirds, documenting shifts in their distribution and abundance as winter
progresses. I've posted a proposal for Sound Waterbird Monitoring at
<http://www.halcyon.com/salix/swm_what.htm> with additional details. Would you
be interested in joining the network?
--
Scott Richardson
northeast Seattle
salix at halcyon.com
http://www.halcyon.com/salix/