Seabird surveys are an art which is trying to evolve toward a science. They try to make accurate counts of seabirds from ships following set pathways (transects) at sea, and to make these counts comparable from year to year. They try to standardize all the variables which might confound these comparisons. The standardized count procedures are called Protocols. Our approach to protocols for our LIS bird count cruises is summarized here.
There are three essential people: "1" the captain who steers the ship to follow the standardized path of the transect, "2" the observer/recorder who observes birds and also records all the details into a voice recorder in real time throughout the trip (the small voice recorder being held in one hand, which is also holding the binoculars), and "3" the observer who is even more focused on finding and identifying birds than 2 is. Two birders, 2 and 3, see many more birds than 2 alone would do (3 becomes the primary observer when there are two birders), partly because dictating so many details into the tape recorder is a distraction which subtracts from the intense concentration needed to scan everywhere and see all possible birds, both close and very far away, for most of the full 360 degrees.
Most rigorous seabird surveys have a dedicated recorder who writes the data onto paper pages, or into a laptop computer onboard the ship. We chose instead to dictate the details into a small digital voice recorder as the birds are seen. Our experience with this method is very positive (although it does require a later transcription and keying of the voice data on the audio tape into digital data in a computer).
We also used the iPhone app called Trails to simultaneously record the GPS coordinates over time, for the full duration of the trip. We used a voice recorder to record the following details about bird sightings:
- Time
- Bird species seen, and how many, and their age (immature, adult, etc) where that is obvious.
- Their location relative to the ship (distance away and angle, e.g., 400m at 2o'clock).
- Their altitude and behavior.
- Their direction of travel (if traveling).
- Their association with any ship, or buoy, or whale, or group of other birds.
Examples:
One second-year No.Gannet seen flying 100m right of ship (at "3o'clock") at 20m altitude, flying toward 2o'clock.
One Common Loon 300m left of ship (at 9 o'clock) swimming away, trying to swallow a fish in its bill.
Because of the design configuration of the ship, it was not possible for 2 and 3 to perch on the bow of the ship, but instead positioned themselves in the rear, with most of a 360degree view, except for where the cabin blocked the frontal view. 2 and 3 moved around the rear area enough to see most of that bow view also. Most searching for birds was done actively toward the front and (both) sides of the ship, not the rear. If it was clear that a bird would cross the 3oclock or 9oclock beams, then 2 would wait for that crossing until he counted the bird and its time. Otherwise the bird was counted at a distance, and its position/direction recorded at that time.
There was no down time during the multi-hour counting. One of the two observers could take a brief bio-break when the ship stopped for a few minutes, as it did several time during the day. The other observer on deck would continue the count, and any birds seen would be added to the voice recorder.
Observer 2 wore a digital wrist watch with a large display of hours, minutes, and SECONDS. It was synchronized with the time on the iPhone with its built in GPS. Observation times were generally recorded to the nearest ten seconds, or even to the nearest second if possible for some birds. The GPS recorder in the iPhone logs lat/long positions about every 20 seconds.
The voice recorder audio files (with all the details in them) were backed up to a computer, for possible future analysis, in any of a number of ways, including retroactive application of different protocols to that very granular data. The subset of basic information from these audio files (time, bird species, number of them) was transcribed from the recordings into a worksheet, such as this one for the Dec 3, 2013 trip to the western side of LIS...
LIS BirdCount 2013 Dec 3rd survey cruise <<click here to see summary worksheet
