Winter Farmland Birds Survey

Winter Walks - Introduction

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Winter Walks forms were distributed to all BTO members (all three winters) and subscribers of the journal British Birds (1999/2000 only). The survey was straight forward - if the observer had a regular route, perhaps a Sunday afternoon stroll, or a dog walk, then we were interested in what was seen on each visit. We asked for a location, grid reference, the length of the route, the date and time of each visit and the number of each species seen. Winter Walks produced a level of information half-way between Casual Records and the Square Survey. They were sites chosen by observers, therefore not randomised, but they were regularly visited and, by recording dates and route length, we could get a measure of observer effort. In this way we could get an idea of how often species were seen at the same place and produce reporting rates similar to those used in the BTO's popular Garden BirdWatch.

Winter Walks - Results

The number of routes visited in 1999/2000, 2000/2001 and 2001/2002 are given in the table above. Part of the reason for the drop in coverage between 1999/2000 and 2000/2001 is probably because fewer forms were distributed. Better puiblicity in 2001/2002 may have helped in the last winter. Of all those routes visited, 114 were surveyed in all three winters and 139 were surveyed in two winters. As can be seen in the graph below, individual routes were most often reported 4 times per winter, though 28% of routes were visited on ten or more occasions.

Figure 1. Frequency distribution showing how many times a route was visited per winter.

Visits were spread throughout each winter as shown in the Figure 2 showing the number of routes visited per day for 1999/2000. The red bars show weekends and it is clear that more routes were visited at weekends than during the week. This same pattern was apparent for the other two winters. Figure 3 shows that the number of visits was lower during weekdays than weekend days. Just as we hoped, this survey appealed to people making their regular Sunday stroll

Figure 2. The number of routes visited on each day (black bars) and weekends (red bars) of winter 1999/2000.

Figure 3. The mean (±S.E.) number of routes visited on each day of the week in each year.

The table below gives the total number of birds of each of the target species reported on Winter Walks. These totals exclude multi-species flocks where individual species total could not be determined:

*Note that some Starling flocks (code = SG) may have been erroneously coded as Song Thrush (code = ST) since a small number of unlikely large flocks of “Song Thrushes” were reported. For further analyses, flocks of >10 Song Thrushes were excluded.

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