Breeding Atlas records validation - follow up

Following on from the recent entry put on by Annie, we can now say that we have checked around 50,000 records entered to the winter and breeding atlas so far, entered by almost 200 observers - a fantastic effort so far. It has taken us ages to get up to date with this (having been provided with the necessary links by the BTO during the late winter period). We now hope to check and validate regularly so that any obvious errors etc can be checked and sorted sooner rather than later.

We have only around 120 records that we are still querying (the maximum total was less than 1% which is great). The kinds of problem we are finding are:

wrong grid ref (not matching the named location in the tetrad in some instances) one interesting one was a green woodpecker and other nice species, but sadly in a tetrad somewhere just off the coast of Skokholm! This one turned out to be records from Hampshire and not Pembs at all!

There are a few id issues (we are sorting these out but some may have to remain on the reject list). Some have wrong/inappropriate breeding codes entered. By and large though not many obvious glitches so far!

Apologies to those of you who we have contacted by us personally and/or by automatic emails about corrections etc. We are trying to be as thorough as we can - and we are checking every species and location etc. The records start off yellow/amber; if we have a query the record turns brown and when the record is agreed/amended etc, the record turns green. The software provided for checking is quite brilliant. We also have OS maps of our own on GIS (MapInfo) with all the tetrads on, plus high resolution of place names etc - so we should hopefully spot location errors!

A PLEA....! A lot of records are going in via BIRDTRACK. Great, but please to those of you who do this can you try and remember to submit a breeding code if possible at this time of year. It makes the record so much more valuable.

For example, we have records of 10,000 puffins on Skomer, 20,000 plus shearwaters etc from the same place. We have nice counts of species from many out of the way coastal tetrads. None of these tell the Atlas that the birds may actually be breeding! Without a breeding code the records are not much use to the Atlas. We all know these birds breed here but the atlas needs a code to enable it to be plotted.

If you haven't yet logged onto the atlas give it a go and enter more roving records, it is actually pretty straightforward. We cannot extract your records from the BLOG so please make them count if you can. We hope to put some preliminary species maps up on the BLOG soon and possibly in the next Bird Report so watch this space!