Breeding Birds Atlas - non-breeders/migrants

There have been queries on the Bird Atlas Forum about dealing with species with no breeding evidence - migrants, long-staying winter visitors etc. This is what Dawn Balmer, BTO Atlas Project Organiser advises:

"We are keen to be as complete as possible in our recording during the breeding season fieldwork months of April-July. If we collect as much info as possible, including species with no code, then we might be able to do some interesting things with the data. There will be information on passage migrants that we might be able to combine with data from other sources to add interest in the final analysis.

In the areas I rove I still have quite a lot of winter visitors present such as Teal, Snipe, Goldeneye, Goosander and I've been entering these with no code to indicate they are still present in the tetrad on that specific date.

Please encourage your volunteers to enter Roving Records without breeding codes if none apply".