Dedicated birders receive special recognition after counting birds for twenty years, all in the name of science

PictureDedicated volunteer. Image: David Tipling/BTO
Over 150 people have recorded birds on their own patch of countryside for twenty years, all in the name of science. These birdwatchers were among the first to volunteer for the Breeding Bird Survey in 1994, and are still surveying their sites as this long-running scheme reaches its 20th birthday.

Counts from the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) are used to produce population trends for over 100 UK birds, and these figures feed in to research and conservation work. This has included monitoring the success of agri-environment schemes, unpicking the causes of declines in our summer migrants, and investigating the effects of introduced species and climate change on bird numbers.

More than 2,500 people now participate in the survey, making two visits a year to randomly-selected sites. Over the last twenty years BBS volunteers have made over 100,000 survey visits and walked a distance equivalent to ten times round the earth, binoculars in hand, recording over 16 million individual birds along the way.

The results from BBS sites that have been surveyed by the same person over many years are particularly valuable, and on the 20th birthday of the survey we are thanking and celebrating our most committed BBS volunteers, who have each been given a specially-designed BBS pin badge as a memento.

Here’s what some of them have to say about their twenty years:
  • I believe the data makes a very valuable contribution to the wider picture of the state of our wild bird populations, and there is no small satisfaction making the effort for this. Nick Tardivel

  • The achievement of reaching remote squares, after a seemingly vertical climb, with the reward of panoramic views of the Cheviots, singing Skylarks, ‘pipping’ pipits, calling Curlews, and Snipe drumming is all the incentive needed to keep going, year after year, to this beautiful part of Northumberland. Muriel Cadwallender

  • It’s great fun, it is always good to be out birding and recording birds; you never know what you will find - on one occasion I found the island’s first Lesser Whitethroat just after I finished the count. David Jardine

  • I appreciate the value of persisting with an average square of farmland, to enable the gathering of data to show just how badly our farmland birds are doing. Louise Bacon

  • The opportunity to take part in a bird survey in beautiful surroundings, being ‘up with the lark’ as the day wakens is great reward. So much so that I have taken on four more squares since! Andrew King

  • I am pleased to be a small part of an important conservation tool which makes doing the survey worthwhile. Heather Coats

  • 2014 marks my 20th year of surveys. It is now part of my early summer; I love the excuse (and of course the prompt) to be up early and taking in the route and, like old friends, the birds I can expect to find along the way. Paul Copestake

  • Each visit I add a few more pieces to the ever changing pattern of bird trends both here on my patch and also in the wider countryside. Vic Fairbrother

BBS National Organiser Kate Risely had this to say: "The BBS dataset is a powerful and sensitive instrument for monitoring changes in bird populations, and we owe this entirely to the astounding dedication of our bird survey volunteers. It is a pleasure and an inspiration to work with them."
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