ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOR TEACHERS AND PARENTS

Training and practice

Before heading out to do a survey make sure everyone is comfortable with the task and able to use the equipment.

There are three areas that should be worked on in advance, and there are exercises we can do to sharpen our skills in each. They are:

1. Ensure everyone can describe the birds they see, even if they can’t identify them. This will take some practice describing the size, colour, shape, the call, and behaviour of the bird.

2. Everyone needs to be comfortable and competent using binoculars, if you are using them. This means able to adjust them to fit the width of their eyes, adjust them to compensate for the difference between left and right eye, able to find the bird while looking through them, and focus quickly and sharply. How to set up binoculars here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkPzl-VPmo4

3. How many birds are there? If I hear one bird but see another, is that two birds or the same one? How do you count a large number of birds quickly? If a large flock zooms past, or the beach is covered with birds that keep moving?

How do we survey?

How we survey will be determined by what we need to know, and what resources we have. What use will we use the data for? How long have we got? Who can help?

We need to state our goals clearly, check we have the resources and time we need, and collect data to satisfy those goals.

What area are we working on? How big is it? Will we survey all of the area, or can we only do part of it? If we only do part, how can we make sure that it is representative of the whole area?

Is the area to be surveyed one sort of habitat, or are there different habitats that need to be considered and surveyed separately?

Do we need any permits or permission to survey the area?

What equipment do we need, and what methods will we use?

How will we record our data when we collect it in the field? Do we need any electronic gizmos to help us or will we use pen and paper?

Do we have enough binoculars, and do we need any other equipment such as GPS units or high-powered spotting scopes? Do we have a good field guide to help with ID?

Do all of the team have sufficient knowledge for the work, or do we need to do some training and practice?

How will we analyse and report our data?

Who will be responsible for collating data if there are multiple surveys by different people?

If we survey different habitats how will we present our data?

Do we want to share our data with others? If so, a standardised format for collecting and recording data is valuable. This will allow us to upload our observations to a national database like BirdData (BirdLife Australia), or an international database like eBird (Cornell University).

Birdlife Australia has an app that you can use to record and submit your surveys as you go! You can edit the data afterwards if you are not sure. If you don’t want to use an app you can simply use a notebook and submit your data later.

Training exercises:

1. Describing birds.

Exercise one. Spotting birds - Birders refer to the GISS (pronounced JIZZ) of a bird. It is thought the term was ‘borrowed’ from aircraft spotters, and it refers to “General Impression, Size, and Shape”. This is the overall impression you get when you see a bird, even at a glance. When you see a familiar bird, like a Magpie or a Willie Wagtail, you don’t consciously analyse colour, shape and behaviour to do your ID, you just know that the black and white bird, about that big, pulling beetle larvae out of the road verge lawn is a Magpie. You have subconsciously gone through all of those characteristics. It is the same way we spot our friends in the distance, because of the style and colour of their hair, their height and the way they walk.

Not everyone has spent much time looking at birds, but we can build on their limited knowledge to make them better birders. Let’s get used to size and shape of birds.

Exercise two. Describe birds - Can you match the parts of the bird to these illustrations?

Basic anatomy of a bird drawing with simple useful terms. Wing, beak, tail, chest, throat and then maybe crown, gape, supercilium, primaries, tail band?

2. Flat birds

Flat birds can be used to practice focusing binoculars, and used to find birds in the field of view of the binoculars. They can be used for practice inside, but better still they can be arranged in their appropriate habitat outside. They help with putting a scale on birds at a distance, as people frequently see birds as bigger or smaller than they really are.

To start, list the birds that are common in your area that everyone in the group can recognise. This will be the ones like Magpie, Willie Wagtail, and maybe Galah, Laughing Turtle-dove, Australian Ringneck, Rainbow Lorikeet, Australian Raven, White Ibis, New Holland honeyeater, Splendid Fairy Wren.

Make sure there is at least one bird for each person in the group, and make sure there are a range of different size birds.

Pick a bird and find photos or drawings of the bird. Print out the pictures, making sure you have scaled them to make them the right size. Photocopiers are good for scaling. (You could do it all in black and white, with three different sized birds, the Magpie, The Magpie Lark, and the Willie Wagtail).

Glue the pictures onto stiff cardboard and cut them out. If you think you might want to run workshops with them you could get them laminated.

Tape the cut-out shape onto a wire frame, so it can be stuck in the ground or tied to a tree branch. Wire coat hangers are good for this.

Practice finding the birds quickly in the viewfinder, and g from one to another and change focus.

3. Counting birds.

Heard but not seen. How many calls do you recognise? Sometimes when we don’t get close enough to see a bird we can tell by its call. Separate Carnaby’s and RedTail Black Cockatoos?

Large numbers in a flock. Exercise in looking at a picture of a lot of birds quickly. Count a subset and multiply out the area.

Want to know more?

CLICK HERE for a very good and thorough explanation of how to count birds.

4. Perform an area survey.

There are many ways to structure a bird survey so that our data is not only useful for us, but can be shared with others. This way our data can become part of a bigger project at a state, national or international level. The most useful survey to share with others for big picture health of our bird populations is the 2ha 20 minute survey. In this survey birders use a standardised area and time, which means we can repeat the survey again and again and monitor change over time in the one place.

Two hectares is 20,000 square metres. You can think of it as a rectangle 100m x 200m, or as a circle 80m in radius.

Take some pegs and a measuring tape out to the oval and peg out a 2ha area so you can see wat it looks like. Count the number of paces, at your normal walking pace, it takes to walk 100m. You might find you need 120 or 200 paces to walk 100 m.

Click Here for a very good summary of bird survey types and techniques here: