I said I'd come back to Birdtrack. This is a website where you can put your UK and Ireland bird sightings and they will be kept safely. This is good for you if you are the type of person who likes to be able to be able to review what birds you've seen but don't want to have to spend time going through lots of old notebooks. And it's good for ornithology and nature conservation too, because your sightings are available to the BTO and RSPB (and Birdwatch Ireland) to build up an even better picture of bird distributions, arrival and departure dates and trends in numbers. We do know a lot about birds but there is plenty that we don't - and Birdtrack will fill in some of the gaps.
There's a little bit of effort involved in logging on to the system and setting up your own sites but after that you are away.
Here are a couple of simple analyses I've done with my own records that I find interesting.
From 1992-98 I had the same office at The Lodge and kept a window list each year. So I know the first day that I saw each species. In 1992 spotted flycatchers were a common sight but they became rarer and rarer as time went on - I haven't seen one at all so far this year! And during those seven years it seemed that the spot flys arrived later each year:
1992 18 May
1993 19 May
1994 10 May
1995 22 May
1996 21 May
1997 24 June
1998 3 June
Maybe not completely convincing because we don't know which days I was in the office. But suggestive and interesting - at least to me. And possible because I put the records into Birdtrack and it's so easy to look at them in this type of way.
Here's another example. At Stanwick Lakes, my local patch in Northants, I keep a list of which species I see on every visit and all of them go onto Birdtrack. So far this year I haven't seen a turtle dove at Stanwick, and yet I'm sure they used to be quite regular. Well here are the results for the last five years:
2005 6 records in 13 visits
2006 2 records in 4 visits
2007 1 record in 4 visits
2008 1 record in 10 visits
2009 0 records in 9 visits
It certainly looks as though they are a lot rarer these days. The same thing is happening right across the country - and that's where Birdtrack will be so powerful over the years - the patterns of arrival dates and numbers added up across thousands of observers (including you?) will paint a clearer, richer picture of the ups and downs of bird populations.
Give it a try! Your records of barn owls, kingfishers and any other species are really useful - particularly if you can keep full lists of all species you see.