Generating a Property Bird List

Many landowners and land managers would like to know what birds are using the property that they are looking after. That’s an important question, and one that HBOC would like to help to address. However, we are a small club, entirely operated by volunteers, and our resources are limited. We can only do what our members put up their hands for.

These notes are intended to help you decide how to go about starting bird surveys of your property or the one you’re managing or that you are undertaking habitat restoration on.

A Bird List for your Property

There are professional ornithologists who, for a small fee, can visit your property and generate a bird list. That list can be of just the birds they saw or heard during their visit, or it can include their predictions of what other species might be present based upon the habitats present.

HBOC usually is not able to help with one-off surveys, but we can point you at the relevant professionals who could help. Also, we can advertise to our members about the opportunity to survey your property and see if there are any takers. We’re happy to do that but there are no guarantees that anyone will come forward.

By the way, a one-off survey will only find half or less of the birds that may use the property at a given point in time. To find the others and to get a proper idea of what birds use the property requires longer-term surveys.

Sometimes it is possible to generate a bird list from existing data collected from the general area around the property. At the bottom of this page we explain how you can do that.

Long-term Surveys

We are interested in projects which involve long-term studies of birds in a well-defined area, especially if that area includes important habitat for threatened species. We are keen to assist in getting projects like that underway, and we can also advise you on how to collect and handle the data.

Long-term studies usually involve monthly or quarterly visits over multiple years.

If you own or manage a property which has habitat for threatened species, or have been conducting habitat restoration and would like to know how things have changed over time, we encourage you to contact us and suggest a long-term bird survey project. Bearing in mind that our resources are limited and that we rely entirely upon volunteers, we ask that you tell us why surveys of your property are warranted and give your thoughts about how the project could proceed in a sustainable way.

Here are some points for you to address in your request to us:

  • Where is your property?
  • What habitats occur on it and why might they be important? What sizes are they?
  • Do any of your neighbouring properties have similar habitats and are those neighbours interested in joining the study?
  • Do you have any recent records of threatened bird species on your property? What species, when did it happen, and how many of them were present?
  • Do you have available any local people with an interest in birds, who are willing to participate in the surveys?
  • The extent of HBOC involvement will be entirely dependent upon us finding some volunteers – either to help with the surveys or to help train your own volunteers in bird identification and in data recording, so that you become self-sufficient.

Please send your request for assistance to secretary@hboc.org.au.

How to generate a bird list for an area

  1. Using your preferred browser, navigate to BirdLife Australia’s national bird archive, called Birdata, which is found at www.birdlife.birdata.org.au.
  2. Select the Explore tab
  3. Use the + button, or your mouse, to zoom into the map so that it shows the general area that you are interested in seeing data
  4. The presence of red circles indicates where there are sites where someone previously has done a survey.
  5. From the left-hand panel, select “Restrict to visible map area”
  6. On the right-hand panel now, there will be a list of all the birds recorded from surveys within the visible area. The additional data for each species give the number of times it was recorded, and what that corresponds to as a percentage of all the surveys.
  7. You can print or download the list by using the buttons at the top of the right-hand panel
  8. You can further refine the bird list by going to the left-hand panel, selecting “Restrict to polygon” and then drawing a polygon around the specific area of interest to you. The polygon can be any shape and size that you wish.  To draw a polygon, move your cursor to a spot on the map, click, then do a series of moves and clicks until you are back at where you started. A greyed-out area will appear on screen, and the bird list now will be a list only of the birds recorded within the greyed-out area.