Stats Saturday: 19–25 August 

SABAP2 is an important project because the distributions of bird species are changing rapidly, and the timing of migration is changing too. SABAP2 puts real emphasis on the collection of data throughout the year, and especially during the periods of arrival and departure of migrants. Thank you for your participation. It is valued greatly.

Overall SABAP2 growth this past week, from Saturday 18 August to Friday 24 August, was impressive 371 checklists. This exceeds our target of 350 checklists per week by quite a good margin! Well done, Team SABAP2. During the week, the number of pentads atlased for the very first time was 14 and the number of pentads atlased for the first time in 2012 was 69. SABAP2012 reached 22% on Monday. Checklist length averaged 47.6 species, so checklist length is creeping upwards with the slow but steady return of mainly the intra-African migrants.

During this past week, we added 17 680 records to the database. We are only 87 000 records short of four million records in the SABAP2 database. This represents about five weeks of atlasing.

SpringMAP2012, our miniproject for this arrival-on-migration period, is gathering momentum. Since we started on 8 August, 512 checklists have been submitted for 407 pentads. During this arrival period, we especially welcome repeat checklists of the same pentads; this is best measured as the ratio of checklists to pentads visited. So far, we have 1.26 checklists for every pentad visited since 8 August. Last week this statistic was 1.13. Frequent checklists for a pentad enable us to determine the pattern of arrival of migrants for that pentad.

The past week has had a full complement of "species days." Last Sunday, the snake of the day was the Marbled Tree Snake (link to this "snake"). Mad Mammal Monday featured the otters of Africa ( "mammal"). The tree for Tree Tuesday was the Toad Tree ("tree"), and Weaver Wednesday provided an outstanding focus on the Southern Masked Weaver ("weaver"). On Threat Thursday, we discussed the "Vulnerable" Great White Shark ("threatened species") and, yesterday, Thank Goods It’s Frog Friday highlighted the Banded Rubber Frog ("frog").

The number of people who have "liked" the ADU's "page" on Facebook grew to 671. This is rapidly becoming the best consolidated source of all the ADU's news. The page is at www.facebook.com/animal.demography.unit. This "page" attained its maximum reach ever during the week; 15 851 unique people saw content which was on the ADU Facebook page in a single week.

Les Underhill
2012-08-25

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