New Hertfordshire Bird Atlas

Starting in November 2007 and running for four years, the Herts Bird Club will be collecting data to produce a new county bird atlas, surveying all 491 tetrads (2km x 2km squares) that include part of the county. This project will run alongside, and use the same methods as, Bird Atlas 2007-11 - the British Trust for Ornithology / BirdWatch Ireland / Scottish Ornithologists Club atlas of the birds of the whole of Britain and Ireland. Read more

The populations and distributions of Britain's birds are in a constant state of flux, as changes in the habitat and climate impact all aspects of their lifecycle. Only by monitoring where, when and in what numbers are our birds using the variety of habitats and resources within the county can we hope to understand these impacts.

Annual monitoring schemes, such as the BTO/RSPB/JNCC Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) operate by counting birds in randomly selected squares and provide yearly measures of population change. At the county level this gives only a broad indication of the changes in a relatively small number of species. Atlas projects complement the BBS by providing comprehensive information on the distribution of birds, covering far more squares than BBS.

The new Hertfordshire atlas will comprise the first systematic assessment of the distribution of birds in the county in winter and the third breeding season atlas, updating the distribution maps for 1988-92 published in The Breeding Birds of Hertfordshire and reproduced in interactive format on this website.

Winter and Breeding Season Data Updated

New data for the winter and breeding seasons are now available on this website via the New Winter Atlas map index and New Breeding Atlas map index pages. Alternatively, you can access the data by tetrad by clicking through the Winter Season Status Map or Breeding Season Status Map.

The winter maps include all data entered to the Bird Atlas 2007-11 website by 14 Nov 2008. This comprises 5763 unique species registrations from Timed Tetrad Visits in 215 tetrads and 6259 unique Roving Records from 386 tetrads.

The breeding season maps include data entered online before 26 Nov 2008, paper TTV forms received by the BTO by mid-September and paper Roving Records forms received by mid-October. After eliminating duplicates, this comprises 4503 possible breeding records, 3350 probable breeding records and 3497 confirmed breeding records.

These results are provisional and some records may subsequently be removed if they are found to be mis-identifications or data entry errors.

3 December 2008

Customised Recording Forms Now Available

In preparation for the second season of winter fieldwork, new functionality has been added to this website to allow you to print a custiomised recording form for any tetrad. This has the recording date shaded out for those species which have already been recorded, allowing you to focus on finding the remaining species. For example, despite an excellent species list, the Great Amwell tetrad (TL31R) still has a few missing species as shown on its Recording Card.

14 October 2008

Breeding Season Coverage Map Added

As the breeding season gets underway and fieldwork for this part of the project starts to accumulate breeding evidence, you can keep track of progress on the breeding season coverage map. This reflects Timed Tetrads Visits and Roving Records submitted online to the Bird Atlas 2007-11 website.

Please note where there are gaps in coverage and consider visiting those less-frequented parts of the county and submitting Roving Records.

It will take a while before the first results for the breeding season are added to this website, as we are heavily dependent upon web development resources at the BTO headquarters to provide the data transfer functionality.

29 April 2008