Birdtrack

Many of you will be aware of the Birdtrack project which is an online bird recording scheme developed through a partnership between BTO, RSPB and BirdWatch Ireland. It is a year-round recording scheme that will use data from birdwatchers records to support species and site conservation at local, national and international scales. Results produced by BirdTrack will include mapping the migration and movements of birds and monitoring of scarce birds in Britain and Ireland. BirdTrack follows on from the successful Migration Watch project that looked at spring migration in 2002-2004. Very little is known about the timing of arrival and departure of winter visitors and this is just one area in which BirdTrack will provide useful information. There are also many scarce birds where we would like to know much more about their populations.

The Herts bird club can now access all Hertfordshire records on demand and download the records in Excel format. It is therefore well worth using as a way of sending in records to the club and holding personal records as well as providing data to the BTO and other organisations: the data is completely secure so there is no possibility of data loss due to a hard disk failure on a home computer. The scheme is based around site visits and recording all of the species seen on the visit but it is possible to use it to enter casual records as well.

For the more unusual county records the existing website submission method should be used as well, the duplicate records can be eliminated at a later stage. The reason for this is that I don't download the Birdtrack records every day so an interesting record might not be seen for some time and therefore other birders would lose the chance to see the species.

Alan Gardiner, Bulletin editor