If you go down to the woods today, you may not be guaranteed to see too many birds but you could well bump into a census-taking birdwatcher. The Biological Records Centre celebrated its 50th anniversary this summer and citizen science flourishes in Britain as never before. If one needs proof, look no further than the proliferation of published bird atlases, in which every single scrap of data has been sourced from the fields and woods by volunteers and then donated freely to the atlas editors. The resulting books are among the most compelling statements of our nation’s amateur fixation with nature.
Since 2011, around 20 such works have gone to press, covering counties or regions as diverse as Greater London and Clackmannanshire. They span the country from Sussex to Aberdeen and Argyll. They culminated recently in the largest-ever nationwide stocktake of our avian populations by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), Bird Atlas 2007-2011 (£69.99). Indeed, it is the field census efforts undertaken by the BTO’s army of volunteers that have, in many cases, catalysed the recent slew of regional and county-based works.
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