Wednesday 6 May 2015

Data crunching begins.

Having acquired the consent of all ringing groups and individuals that have ringed Storm Petrels on Nan Ron over the years, the BTO have released all the data in the central database to me. Primarily this consists of two sets of records - all the new birds and all of the recoveries. We have not considered retraps as from the early years they wont have been reported and from recent years we dont know whether all have been submitted or not, so we are keeping to the knowns.

A quick and ready analysis of the new birds ringed by year, which totals 28,653 (to the end of 2014), is shown below. It can be clearly seen that capture and ringing activity increased 50fold in the years following 1999. Since then ringing totals have averaged c1700/year.


2015 season

This year we are going slightly later than we normally would to work around a full moon - we will thus be going at the beginning of August rather than the end of July. To date the team consists of 13 - some regulars, some returners and some Nan Ron virgins.
Not long now.....