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 slightly lower,
numbers in my particular count area.

good birding,

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