Annual report 2012: overall picture

This is an overall report on birds observed in Carwoola in 2012.  I use the term Carwoola to cover the catchment area of the Stoney Creek Gazette,  As well as Carwoola itself it includes a bunch of localities (including Primrose Valley and, importantly, Hoskinstown) to the SE of Queanbeyan.  It is illustrated in this sketch map:

The database I maintain is pretty well restricted to that area to provide some consistency.  However if very interesting birds are reported in a some what wider area:

• where people might like to go and view the birds (eg sightings of Banded Lapwings just outside  Bungendore and Plumed Whistling Ducks on dams close thereto); or
• the sighting suggests we should keep an eye in case they also turn up here

I will also include them on this blog but not the database nor - other than mentions like this - in my reports.

While I largely followed the model used for the Annual Report for 2011, in particular the decision to adopt a multi-post approach, what follows has to some extent evolved during writing.  .  (For those that think the result is still too long, the Canberra Ornithologists Group Annual Bird Report is 80 A5 pages - and 2Mb to download!)

This report will be a bit heavy on numbers but I will attempt to explain them in terms of their meaning rather than simply a barrage of percentages!  For those who wish to skip the statistics I have tried to highlight the main points in bold blue.

By the end of 2012 we had recorded, over a 6 year period, 176 species in the catchment area of the Gazette.  89 (50.6%) of these had been recorded undertaking some form of breeding activity. 11 species were observed for the first time in 2012 and as for last year 19 have been recorded in every month.

It is interesting that over a 30 year period the Garden Bird Survey, run by the Canberra Ornithologists Group has recorded 239 species with 108 of these (46.2%) recorded as breeding.  Given the much shorter time span and far fewer observers I think we have, to quote Young Mister Grace, "...all done very well."

In 2012, 150 species were recorded in the study area.  This is 84% of those ever recorded in the area.  This graph shows the number of species recorded per year.

Some analysis of the growth in species recorded has already been posted on this blog.  For the last three years the reporting effort has been broadly comparable and the drop between 2010 and 2011 is, as yet, unexplained.  The increase between 2011 and 2012 is in part:

• a recovery to "normal" increase in diversity; but mainly
• the astonishing variety of birds seen in and near an ephemeral swamp in the Hoskinstown Plain

In 2012 34.7% of the species recorded were observed undertaking some form of breeding activity.  This value is slightly lower than in other years in this area and it is tempting to ascribe this to some attribute of the year (eg the very high rainfall in January - March).  Another possible cause is the inflation of the denominator of this average by a relatively high number of vagrant species

Links to other sections of this report

2012 cf other 5 years, 2012 cf 2011, Breeding