How to report your spring migrant sightings

The past 10 days have seen the first arrivals of those typical heralds of spring — Northern Wheatear and Sand Martin — across the southern half of Britain. For birders, this arrival marks the onset of one of the most exciting periods of the ornithological year. Over the next 10 weeks, summer migrants will flood into Britain and Ireland. Many will stay to breed, while others will stage here en route for breeding destinations further north.

One of the great joys of spring birding is recording 'first dates' of common migrant species arriving back at local sites. It is also an exciting time for us here at BirdGuides, where we relish receiving the first reports of returning migrants. However, it's not long before the floodgates open and a trickle of House Martins sightings along the south coast quickly turns into a deluge of records from every corner of Britain and Ireland. It's around about this point that we need to make a decision: has the species arrived in sufficient numbers that a sighting is no longer 'national news'? If the answer is yes, we generally won't feature sightings of that particular species on our Bird News Extra pages from that point onwards.

Seeing your first Northern Wheatear of the spring is always a very gratifying experience (Photo: Nick Appleton)

Just because a species is no longer making our national news page doesn't mean that your own first sighting of that species is any less special, and we appreciate that many birders are still eager to record their first migrants. It is this point that we'd like to (re)introduce BirdTrack.

BirdTrack allows you to enter regular sightings from specific birding trips and/or when you are out and about closer to home, either as lists or as one-off 'casual' records. Once you have added a few years' worth of data (which can be backdated records, either added via a bulk upload tool if you already have them in an Excel spreadsheet, or by going through your old notebooks and entering them manually), you'll be able to use BirdTrack to compare your first sighting dates. You can also view maps and graphs of your various records, which can reveal all sorts of interesting patterns. At the same time — and without you having to lift a finger — local bird recorders have access to your records (with your permission), which means they are automatically available for use in bird reports, atlases and other local projects. Crucially, all of the information is available for conservation science too, helping researchers to build up a picture of what is happening with our migrants.

BirdTrack allows anyone to compare reporting rates for the current year against a historical average for any species, in this case Sand Martin so far in 2015.

There's no need to stop recording once you've entered your first sighting of a particular species of migrant; you can keep recording migrants, along with everything else you positively identify, all summer long. BirdTrack isn't just great for logging first dates of spring migrants. It's easy to remember when you saw your first Sand Martin this year; but how many of you can remember when you saw your last Redwing? By entering your observations throughout the year, it's easy to look up the date of your last sighting. Better still, if you add your records as complete lists of everything you've identified on your birding trips to particular sites, this also allows your records to contribute to the national reporting rate for each species. We also urge you to include breeding evidence with your BirdTrack records during the period March–August; this makes observations of common species more valuable to local recorders and, for scarcer species, can provide vital information for the Rare Breeding Birds Panel.

In the same vein, birders holidaying in Europe this spring/summer can collect useful information for the second European Breeding Bird Atlas, adding it via BirdTrack's global data entry tool.

If you're lucky enough to encounter a scarce migrant or a high count of a commoner species that you think other birders should know about, please also report such sightings to BirdGuides, as well as logging it in BirdTrack, in one of the usual ways.