are Double-barred Finches declining in the ACT? - Using website data

[Martin Butterfield <>]

My impression is that Phalaris has been around for ages.  However African Lovegrass has only started contending (against St John's Wort) for the title of ACT Territory plant in the last few years.  That would seem to correlate withe the major recent downturn in DB Finch reporting rates.  But correlation isn't causation, and thus add one to the "we don't know" list.

Martin Butterfield

http://franmart.blogspot.com.au/

On Fri, 25 Jan 2019 at 08:34, Con Boekel <> wrote:

There may be unknown unknowns impacting Double-barred Finch numbers.

We usually know little about what pathogens are out and about and how they might be impacting on species populations.

In an idle moment (hunched indoors away from Global Warming) I thought I might see when Phalaris was first introduced. It is now a wide-spread pasture grass that has readily invaded disturbed natural habitats. The background was that I had noted Red-browed Finches feeding on Phalaris seeds but had not seen Double-barred Finches do so and was therefore curious about possible temporal correlations between Phalaris and finch numbers. On that issue I am none the wiser.

But, while Googling 'Phalaris' I came across 'Phalaris staggers'. The short message is that Phalaris can kill stock. Could Phalaris also kill birds? We simply don't know.

http://centraltablelands.lls.nsw.gov.au/livestock/livestock-advice/sheep/phalaris-staggers

regards

Con

On 1/24/2019 7:11 PM, Steve Read wrote:

To develop Con’s first point below, I have suspected for a while that the rapid increase in eBird lists as a proportion of total submitted records has been associated with a change in the type and location of records, with a relatively large number of lists now being submitted from suburban areas (such as when people are having their morning suburban walk, or are on the way to work) where finches of any sort may be less common, but especially Double-barred Finch and Diamond Firetail. This would mean that the parameter ‘reporting rate’, normally calculated to allow for differences in the total number of records between different time periods, may have become less useful for comparisons in the complete data set of records across time.

 

Answering John’s original question for a particular site would require looking for changes in the reporting rates of a species over time at that site (as well as abundance when reported). Such an approach may well show drops in reporting rate and abundance at sites at which Double-barred Finch were reasonably common. It would also identify sites at which Double-barred Finch now occur when they were not observed historically, as well as sites where they have never been seen or heard.

 

But overall I think that gross reporting rate can misleading when the nature, location or type of records changes over time.

 

Steve

 

 

From: Con Boekel m("boekel.com.au","con");" target="_blank"> <>
Sent: Thursday, 24 January 2019 5:11 PM
To: m("canberrabirds.org.au","canberrabirds");" target="_blank">
Subject: Re: [canberrabirds] are Double-barred Finches declining in the ACT? - Using website data

 

Martin

Thank you. An interesting analysis. There are other consideration that may have a bearing:

1. e-recording has changed the citizen science landscape to a significant degree. However different it may be from recording using the old system, e recording has resulted in a large increase in data, often from people who did not previously report data.

2. there is a long term drying trend consequent to Global Warming. This would almost certainly be having an impact on seed productivity.

3. changes to kangaroo grazing which, I assume, is both more pervasive and heavier in much of the former DBF habitats. In particular, kangaroo grazing may well interrupt seed set and seed fall.

4. composition of the grass layer may be a factor. Grass spp composition is changing all the time. Seed size is an important consideration for some seed eating species.  Phalaris is preferred by RBF, for example. What impact will African Love Grass have?

regards

Con

On 1/24/2019 4:25 PM, Martin Butterfield wrote:

A timely comment by Julian. 

 

I would add that as well as the charts of reporting rates there is a tab for reporting rate data.   With a small amount of fiddling around I downloaded that to EXCEL to see what it told me.  

 

A first observation is that the rates for the first 4 years up to and including 1985 looks  to be a mixture of months with very low rates (several of zero) and a few high rates (eg March 1985 = 18.2).  So I excluded them.  I then plotted the rates and got EXCEL to calculate 2 trend lines,  The linear (ie straight line) trend has a nice downwards slope and an r2 of just over 0.5, which is quite strong.  Using a 4th order polynomial to get a better fit shows a steep initial decline, then a leveling out until 2012 and another steep decline until 2017.  As is expected the r2 is somewhat higher at 0.60.

I then looked more closely at the data for 1986 and 1987.  While there are many less months with a  rate of zero there are still a few very high values (eg May 1986 20.7 and July 1986 18.2).  This seems to affect the reliability of the trends: removing those two years gives lines with a similar shape but the values of r2 drop to ~0.4 for the linear trend and ~0.5 for the polynomial.  Thus I am not sure that one can be certain about there being a "trend".  

 

I note that 1986-87 were the first two years of the ACT Atlas project and wonder if those two years are a result of the flush of enthusiasm for that?  WRT to the recent steep drop off this appears to coincide with my observations of the weather in Carwoola of the beginnings of this drought.  Another factor could be be the degradation of Finch Central at Coppins Crossing to make way for the Such Lovelu Unvegetated  Molonglo development.  (At least it has a good acronym.)

 

Martin Butterfield

http://franmart.blogspot.com.au/

 

 

On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 14:41, Julian Robinson <> wrote:

A reminder that the intention of our website Bird Data pages is to enable people to answer this kind of question easily and accurately themselves.  A summary of all the information from our database is there (and probably provides a better long-term view than ebird at this stage).  This is not to suggest we shouldn’t discuss such  questions on the chatline, but the website data does provide a good starting point for discussion and does answer many simple questions.

 

For those who haven’t used it before, using Double Barred Finch as the example …

 

·        Go to the website / click on Our Birds / Bird Info

·        Scroll down the list to find Double Barred Finch (by default the list is sorted alphabetically)

·        Click on the icon of a graph in the right hand column

 

There is a deceptively large amount of information available… two examples relevant to the question being asked:

·        Click on Reporting Rates tab. (Reporting Rate is  the percentage of all surveys in which DBFs were present). The graph shows reporting rates since COG started systematic collection of data in the mid-1980s.  In this case it is easy to see: a) a long term general decline in reports of DBFs, and b) in the last three years shown (2015 – 2017 reporting years), a particularly large drop in reports.  Without knowing anything about stats you can see a decline in reporting rate from generally about 4% to about 1.3% in the most recent year.  We could therefore say that DBFs are about a third as common as they were, or that they have dropped by two-thirds.  The Abundance tab (the average number of DBFs per survey) shows a similar decline.

·        Click on Distribution map tab.  Underneath are two new tabs showing distribution in latest year and over all years.  If you compare the two you can see that in the last year, DBFs are more restricted in their distribution than they have been historically.  This is tricky to draw conclusions from since the “all years” is an aggregate and will naturally cover more territory than any particular year.  What it does suggest is that there isn’t any obvious geographic shift from, say, north to south or rural to urban.

 

Other info includes breeding data and seasonality/monthly variations.

 

Comparison with the figures for Red-browed Finch and Diamond Firetail tends to support John’s observations, at least for the RBF.   The DFT however is lower (2017) than at any time in our recorded history and seems to have suffered a precipitous and continuous decline since a strong peak around 2010.  It will be interesting to see what the upcoming ABR shows about the 2018 year for all three species, as per Con’s comments.

 

Julian

Website manager

 

 

 

From: calyptorhynchus [
Sent: Wednesday, 23 January 2019 7:33 AM
To: Canberra Birds
Subject: [canberrabirds] are Double-barred Finches declining in the ACT?

 

This is a sp I used to see quite a bit without looking for it, but recently I realise I have rarely seen them. I continue to see Red-browed Firetails commonly and Diamond Firetails uncommonly.

 

--

John Leonard

 

 

Virus-free. www.avg.com

 

*******************************************************************************************************
This is the email announcement and discussion list of the Canberra Ornithologists Group.
Emails posted to the list that exceed 200 kB in size, including attachments, will be rejected.
All emails distributed via the list are archived at http://bioacoustics.cse.unsw.edu.au/archives/html/canberrabirds. It is a condition of list membership that you agree to your contributions being archived.
When subscribing or unsubscribing, please insert the word 'Subscribe' or 'Unsubscribe', as applicable, in the email's subject line.
List-Post: <>
List-Help: <>
List-Unsubscribe: <>
List-Subscribe: <>
List manager: David McDonald, email <>