Garden Bird Survey Charts

[Duncan McCaskill <>]

As was noted at the June COG remote meeting, the June meeting is the usual occasion for Garden Bird Survey participants to collect new charts, so what can you do to get a new chart this year?

There are a few options to get a new chart for the 2020-21 survey year (which will be the 40th year of the survey). You can do one of the following:

• Do nothing. Wait until normal face-to-face meetings resume and collect your chart then.
• Collect a chart at a COG outing. There will probably be someone with charts at the next few COG outings. I will be at Sunday's Narrabundah Hill walk with charts. I can't guarantee there will be charts at all outings, but I will try to get them to most outings.
• Start using one of the two electronic alternatives to the paper chart (see below).
• Contact me and I, or someone else in COG, can post you a chart or make other arrangements to get a chart to you.

The 2020-21 survey starts on Friday 3 July 2020.

If you normally hand in your completed chart at a COG meeting, could you please just hang on to it until normal meetings resume.

There are two electronic options for doing the Garden Bird Survey:

• You can enter your observations in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet looks a lot like the paper chart, with 52 columns, one for each week, and a row for each species. I can send you a template with detailed instructions.
• You can use eBird. But, you can not just enter your weekly observations as an eBird list - you must adhere to eBird's rules. You need to create a new eBird list each time you are actively birding. I can send more details to anyone who is interested.

Duncan McCaskill

Garden Bird Survey Coordinator