What is Migration Watch?

Have you ever thought about where the first Swallow of the spring is recorded, where the next ones are and the pattern of arrival across the country?  Migration Watch is an exciting web-based project designed to answer exactly these kinds of questions.  The idea is simple; you make a note of the birds you see each day, either out birdwatching, from the office or the garden and enter your daily observations on a simple-to-use web page.  Every night the Migration Watch computer at BTO HQ will look at all the records submitted that day by observers across the country and will produce up-to-date maps showing the arrival and spread of summer migrants throughout Britain & Ireland.  How amazing is that?

Swallow

We hope that birdwatchers and nature enthusiasts of all abilities will take part in Migration Watch. By encouraging large numbers of volunteers to join in the project we will be able to gather a large amount of unique and fascinating information.  The project will focus primarily on summer visitors and passage migrants but we will also be interested to know when the last Redwings, Fieldfares and Bramblings are seen. 

Why Migration Watch?

Migration Watch is so exciting because information has never been collected on this scale before.  It is incredible to think that with the huge interest in birdwatching we still do not know, in detail, the pattern of migratory spread across Britain & Ireland.  Bird Observatories have gathered vast amounts of fascinating information on migration through daily observations and bird ringing and provide a snapshot of migration at isolated coastal localities.  What we hope to do through Migration Watch is to look at the bigger picture.

We are interested to know more about the pattern of arrival and how birds flow through the country once they have arrived.  After the first few early birds have reached the country, how long is it before the main arrival?  In most years there are a few exceptionally early birds recorded, usually in southern and eastern coastal counties, but in Migration Watch we are interested to know about the timing of the main arrival.  We hope to be able to work this out by looking at the proportion of volunteers that have recorded a particular species on a given day. 

By using the lists and counts of species submitted by volunteers we can also investigate how birds filter through the country; do they head up the centre of the country or do they disperse west or east?  Some species such as Pied Flycatcher and Wood Warbler are notorious for being scarce on spring passage and just appearing on their breeding grounds!

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