Hi Hugh, and all -

What is the best way of measuring species abundance on a CBC? If you had the third highest count of Siskins, by raw numbers, does that mean they were really abundant this year - or that you had a lot of participants this year? I know that counting the number of a species and dividing by the number of participants that year is sometimes done. I'm curious how that would change the ranking. It's easy to establish new high counts when a CBC increases its participant total.

Granted every way of measuring species abundance has some flaws, but wouldn't this be a more telling way of looking at local population changes?

I don't have any totals for the Kent-Auburn CBC (divided by fancy math or otherwise) but they seemed to be in normal, or just slightly lower, numbers in my particular count area.

good birding,

Jim Flynn--
buteoreg at comcast.net
Seattle, WA