Winter Atlas records

Happy New Year to everyone and thanks for all the records you have put on to the BTO Bird Atlas so far. If you did not manage to do second winter time-tetrad visits to your allocated tetrads last winter, please try and get to them between now and end of February for the second visit. It is great to see the extra records coming in, keep up the good work!

However, to make your own patch/roving records doubly valuable, try and make sure that they are also entered into the atlas. It is notable, for example, that there are still no atlas tetrad records of any kind (winter or summer) logged for Monkstone Point (SN10L) yet records are appearing from this location on the Blog. Unfortunately we cannot transcribe these records as they have to entered by the original observer. If you want help to do this contact us on rushmoor1@tiscali.co.uk

We were out adding roving records from some under-recorded mid/west Pembs squares yesterday. Apart from the usual winter thrushes etc a flock of around 80 chaffinches were feeding on spilled grain on the road nr Keeston; a merlin flew over near Lambston and we ended up at Point St John of all places, where we noted a roosting flock of 18 curlew on Gwahan (islet off north end of Ramsey). The only other notable bird being a woodcock at dusk near Solva.

We plan to make a short-list of tetrads with no "roving" records soon and add this to the Blog. Hope this will help.