Help with Manchester urban green space bird surveys

Alex Lees · Status: Offline

RE: Help with Manchester urban green space bird surveys

James Richardson · Status: Offline

Alex do you reckon anywhere in central Manchester is suitable for urban goshawks? In Berlin there are large forest parks, no doubt with areas rarely if ever accessed by people during the nesting period.
The Irwell valley has some good habitat, possibly parts of the Mersey valley, other than that areas are too disturbed/small, no? I suppose it would also require a reduction in persecution of source populations, to get the wandering juveniles..

Alex Lees · Status: Offline

Thanks Simon! I know it may be tough to get motivated to count common birds, but I'm always surprised about how much they vary across the annual cycle and between years. Have a look at this data for Blackbird from Vimto Park - https://ebird.org/barchart?r=L4934653&bmo=1&emo=12&byr=1900&eyr=2019&spp=eurbla with a clear signal for migrants (click on abundance).

I'm really interested in the impact of corvids and pigeons on populations of other bird species, so understanding how changes in their abundance varies is really useful. If we ever get to have urban Manchester Goshawks, like they do in Berlin, I'll bet those pigeon/crow numbers will change fast.... Likewise we never know what changes are going to happen, who knew that Greenfinches would collapse so fast.... Having a ballpark idea of numbers 1,5,10,20 is thus better than just an X which might be 1 or a million (e.g. Flamingos in the Rift Valley) so don't worry whether it is is 7 or 8 Magpies as counts will end up being averaged across long time periods....

cheers

Alex

Simon Gough · Status: Offline

Hi Alex,

i will start logging all my sightings for Heaton Mersey Common, I have a look most weeks. It is going to be tough counting Magpies and Woodpigs though, you get used to ignoring them!

Alex Lees · Status: Offline

Hi all

Just as a quick update on progress, I now have an undergraduate and a postgraduate student working on the Manchester Parks eBird dataset looking at the importance of the size, habitat quality and habitat connectivity of Manchester Parks for birds. So a big thanks to everyone who contributed data thus far (120 people last year) as we now have over 150K records. We are doing particularly well with 'the urban core' - see attached data (also visible* here https://tinyurl.com/y2cwzrcq) with thousands of checklists submitted in 3 years from the 3.5km2 of the city centre, so we now have an excellent picture of the trends in usage of urban areas and ideas about how to make these areas more permeable for birds... We hope to link up with some of the moves to increase urban greenspace and use eBird to monitor changes in bird populations that result....

Where we are not doing so well is in the larger parks between the well-birded spots like Sale Water Park and the well-birded city centre - places like Fog Lane Park: https://ebird.org/hotspot/L5422266?yr=all&m=&rank=mrec Heaton Mersey Common https://ebird.org/hotspot/L5422275 and Nutsford Vale if anyone birds those spots and would be interested in collecting data that would be amazing.

best

Alex

*without being logged in to the system and choosing how you display common names, I'm afraid you will be subject to the likes of Mew Gull, Green-winged Teal and Common Merganser, so if the names grate then just create an account and even if you don't use the system to enter data you can still browse bird sightings (600 million) and images (10 million) without having to cope with American names...

Alex Lees · Status: Offline

Hi all

Im a lecturer at MMU and am currently working with the Urban Environments Research group https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/environmental-science-research/urban-environments-research-group/people/ to look at the importance of green spaces in Manchester for birds. I currently have a couple of students looking at how the size of parks and their habitat quality and distance to the city center influences the composition and abundance of bird species. The aim being to work out how we can improve greens paces for birds and other wildlife. The students will be doing some of their own surveys (along with myself) but we will also be using data that anyone can download from eBird https://ebird.org/home in the form of complete checklist data where all species and individuals are recorded for a known time and distance traveled. This sort of data collection championed by Birdtrack and eBird is crucial to understand change in populations over time. We plan to use this data to then look at the impacts of noise pollution and extend this to look at how light pollution may impact bird migration using autonomous sound recorders.

We are focusing on the Oxford Road corridor from the outer ring road to the city centre where I have already set up a number of eBird hotspots in parks which are already in use by several forum members. Im attaching a map of these locations but Id be happy to create more hotspots for peoples local parks anywhere in the city as it would be great to scale-up in future.

It would be great if people could contribute data from Manchester parks into eBird and for those who use Birdtrack or other recording software it is easy to export data into eBird, which would be super useful to up our sample size for this project. Urban birding might not be everyones cup of tea, but over the last year and a have seen Yellow-browed Warbler, Siberian Chiffchaff, Iceland Gull, Waxwings, Woodcock, Treecreeper and Black Redstart in the city centre so all that effort for usually relatively few birds does have its rewards https://ebird.org/hotspot/L4934653/media?yr=all&m

If anyone has any questions then please reply here or please PM or email me.

Alex

https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/environmental-science-research/urban-environments-research-group/people/profile/index.php?id=2643