The influx of new species is probably due in part to me. I was slack this year in reporting and it was months before I got around to transferring my written GBS lists to eBird. My lists would have contained birds like Nankeen Night
Heron which may not yet have been reported. While Philip is right that rural sites are obviously more productive than sites on the middle of suburbia, a few of us are privileged to live on an urban site with water within our 100 metre radius.
I back onto Ginninderra Creek Nicholls below Percival Hill which is the flight corridor between the northern lakes and ponds so I get to report spoonbills etc in my GBS. Also from time to time almost everything which comes down from
Percival Hill.
I chose this block purposely when down sizing. So it is observers like me who contribute some of the more unusual birds to the GBS survey