Yard bird lists

[Tonya Haff <>]

Wow, thank you Martin, that's a really interesting summary. I had no idea that some suburbs had such high species lists!  Looking on a map, it doesn't make intuitive sense to me why some suburbs (say, Curtain) would have had so many more bird species come through than others; do people think this is due to observer bias, because dedicated twitchers live in some suburbs, but not in others?  

I'm North American, and all the twitchers I know there keep 'yard lists', which is simply all the species one sees or hears while directly in one's yard. It's kind of fun, though rather silly - if you see a cool bird down the street, you have to run back to your driveway and try to see it from there. Consequently, I've always followed this tradition.  Honestly, in the middle of O'Connor, I'm really not sure how many more species I'd pick up by walking 100m in any direction!  But the GBS sounds like a good idea - maybe I should start keeping both lists.

Then I could actively hunt for owlet-nightjar!

Cheers,

Tonya

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 7:09 PM, martin butterfield <> wrote:

I rate Tonya's question as interesting since it immediately raises the questions of:

• what is a yard? and
• over what time period?

Milburn's observation, which stimulated Tonya's post, seems to have have been clearly within his property (or at least visible from there).  That is probably a rather more restricted definition that the GBS definition of a site equivalent to a radius of 100m from the property (ie about 3Ha).  However, one could say that if it is within a 3Ha area including the yard the birds are quite likely to be seen in or from the yard.

I will leave to observers to talk about individual, identified, sites but have put up some data at the suburb level in the attachment.  To explain the shorthand of the column headings a tad, taking Aranda as an example:

• over the 29 years of the GBS 127 species have been recorded at least once on one or more of the GBS Charts from that suburb ; and
• the maximum number of species recorded from any one site in that suburb (over a number of years) is 83.

On the first measure Aranda rates 6th, while on the second it comes in at #9

Martin

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 10:05 AM, Tonya Haff <> wrote:

Hi all,

Just curious if anyone has tallies of yard birds for suburbs around Canberra?  I just moved to O'Connor from Aranda, and I'm curious what other people have as typical and high-number bird lists for their yards in town.  A tawny frogmouth in the front yard yesterday brought us up to 35 species since December.

Cheers,

Tonya

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 10:06 PM, Milburns <> wrote:

Earlier this evening while working in the kitchen I heard a 'different' noise outside.  Grabbing the spotlight kept at the back door for such occasions I illuminated the culprit.  Mutual surprise certainly but probably not mutual delight, an Australian Owlet Nightjar and I exchanged 'looks'.

First record for our GBS but given the proximity of Black Mountain and O'Connor ridge probably not too far from usual habitat.

Milburn

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--
Tonya Haff
PhD candidate
Evolution, Ecology and Genetics
Research School of Biology
Australian National University
Mobile:+61-4-3331-2908                                     
Lab: +61-2-6125-5651

-- 
Tonya Haff
PhD candidate
Evolution, Ecology and Genetics
Research School of Biology
Australian National University
Mobile:+61-4-3331-2908                                      

Lab: +61-2-6125-5651