SABAP2012 at 15%

Five and a half months through the year, and SABAP2012 is on 15%. Given that the rate of progress inevitably slows down as easily accessible pentads are reached, this means that we are on track for at least doubling this coverage in the remaining seven and a half months until the end of 2012. We set the initial target for SABAP2012 at 30%, because this is what we achieved in SABAP2011 (without actually trying to visit as many pentads in the year as possible).

The value of trying to visit as many pentads as possible on an annual basis, and of getting several checklists for each pentad in each year, is that it will enable us to make statistically defensible annual statements on variation in timing of migration, both arrival and departure, the impact of differing amounts of rainfall on bird distributions, and trends through time in distribution, both range expansions and contractions. If we can achieve this, South Africa will be the first country on the planet to use bird atlasing as a component of the annual bird monitoring programme. 30% coverage, annually, seems to just enough to be able to do this.

At the same time, we do not want to lose sight of the other priority, and that is, cumulatively through the years, to get as much of the atlas region as possible covered. We are delighted to have passed the 60% coverage level overall at the start of this month. The next big milestone is 2/3rds coverage, 66.67%, and we could easily achieve that by the end of the summer holidays. But it will probably take a few dedicated expeditions to get us there.

There are also regional milestones achieved over the weekend. Yesterday, the Western Cape reached 80% coverage. The last few one-percents in the search for 100% coverage are really tough, so we also celebrate KwaZulu-Natal reaching 96.0% coverage, with only 52 pentads out of 1296 left to visit.

World Migratory Birds Day 2012 – 12–13 May

Of the Animal Demography Unit's array of bird monitoring projects, SABAP2 and SAFRING make the most obvious contribution to an understanding of bird migration. Without this understanding, there would be nothing to celebrate for World Migratory Bird Day this weekend! Bird ringing, and its various derivatives, have enabled us to understand which bird species are migrants, and to track the most amazing long-distance movements of these species across the planet. Bird atlasing, at least if it is done in the way we do it throughout the year in southern Africa, enables us to understand the timing of migration.

The World Migratory Bird Day was initiated in 2006 and is an annual awareness-raising campaign highlighting the need for the protection of migratory birds and their habitats. On the second weekend of May each, people around the world are encouraged to celebrate World Migratory Bird Day. Each year a theme is chosen, and the theme for 2012 is Migratory birds and people – together through time

It was not too long ago that we were starting to think there was nothing more to learn about the migration of the Barn Swallow or that of the Common Tern through bird ringing. There was enough information. If you read the species accounts in the published atlas for SABAP1, they all talk about the timing of migration as if it is set in stone for all time. This paradigm has changed. In January this year, a paper was published in the new journal Nature Climate Change (vol 2, pp 121–124), by Vincent Devictor and 20 other co-authors. It was titled Differences in the climatic debts of birds and butterflies at a continental scale and dealt with the extent to which species (the birds were mostly migrants) are failing to keep pace with increasing temperatures across western Europe. Their paper was based on a sophisticated analysis of citizen science data collected across seven European countries. The results are important in their own right, and highly relevant to the concept of World Migratory Bird Day. But is is the first sentence of the "Acknowledgements" in this paper that I want to highlight: "We thank all skilled volunteer bird- and butterfly-watchers involved in national monitoring programmes; altogether, we estimate that more than 1,500,000 man-hours have been spent to conduct the bird and butterfly monitoring surveys (this estimate only corresponds to field work) necessary to this study."

So I want to end by gently twisting the theme for World Migratory Bird Day for 2012, and changing it to Migratory birds and CITIZEN SCIENTISTS – together through time. The bird ringers and the bird atlasers, the prototype citizen scientists, are the special people who have a critical ongoing role to play in the monitoring of bird migration. So it is essential to find the funding to keep both SAFRING and SABAP2 alive as ongoing projects, empowered to process the data generated by our citizen scientsts, which monitors the impacts of land-use change, climate change, powerlines, windturbines, poisons, ..., on our migrant birds.

Cape Vultures in free fall

David Allan, Durban Natural Science Museum, recently attended the "Vulure Summit" in Kenya. We sent him the "range change map" of the Cape Vulture to comment on. This map provides insight into the changes in reporting rates between SABAP1 and SABAP2; in brief, RED and ORANGE point to decreases, GREEN and BLUE to increases – for the full explanation, see the SABAP1 vs SABAP2 maps interpretation note.

Dave sent his comments (and this magnificent photograh) in response to our request. His banner was "Cape Vultures in free fall" and the image tell the same story. He wrote: "It can be quite hard to get your mind around the numbers when it comes to the Old World Gyps vultures. The global conservation community is still reeling from the Asian vulture crisis. The White-rumped Vulture there decreased by more than 99% over a period of just 10–15 years. Until recently, it was probably the most abundant large bird of prey in the world, with a population in the millions. Today, less than 10 000 individuals survive. It has been the raptor tragedy of our generation, eclipsing even the DDT and dieldrin scares of the mid-1900s. The cause of the catastrophe was the introduction, into veterinary use, of another poison, diclofenac, an ostensibly innocuous non-steriodal anti-inflammatory drug that causes virtual immediate renal failure in Gyps vultures. The birds fell from their roost trees in India and Pakistan like over-ripe fruit, in their hundreds and in their thousands. The scattered survivors of this holocaust stare Armageddon squarely in the face and the White-rumped Vulture is now classed as globally ‘Critical Endangered’, a heartbeat short of the abyss of extinction.

"Indeed, its situation is so dire that its population size is now as low as that of our own Cape Vulture.

"We will never know how many Cape Vultures graced the skies of southern Africa when the San still hunted eland in the Drakensberg, Shaka marshalled his impis on the rolling plains of Zululand and van Riebeeck sailed into Table Bay. But we can be sure it was an orders of magnitude more than today. More breeding colonies have disappeared from the mountains of South Africa than bears thinking about. Cape Vultures no longer breed in Zimbabwe or Swaziland and a remnant colony in Mozambique apparently hangs on by the tips of its talons. When the breeding population in Namibia fell to barely above a single-digit number, the remaining males apparently abandoned the cliffs of their last colony and the one or two females left amongst them and started hybridizing with female White-backed Vultures at tree nests in the surrounding woodland. Only in South Africa, Lesotho and Botswana do anything approaching 'healthy' populations persist.

"At the time of SABAP1 the Cape Vulture population was estimated at 12 000 birds. The latest estimate takes this down to 8 000–10 000 individuals. Ultimately, it's the same fate as the White-rumped Vulture, just played out in slow-motion. A 'death by a thousand cuts' that we countenance the way the frog sits in the slowly heating pot until it's too late to do anything about.

"The SABAP2 map shown here helps ring the alarm bell a little louder. The overwhelming colours are, fittingly, RED (recorded in SABAP1 but not SABAP2 despite there being coverage in the latter period), with the Free State being particularly worrying in this regard, and ORANGE (recorded in both periods but at higher reporting rates in SABAP1 than SABAP2). The gap between the northern and southern populations of this species, first identified in SABAP1 and linked to range retraction, seems to have grown even more pronounced. BLUE (SABAP2 only) and GREEN (SABAP2 reporting rate higher than SABAP1) are few and far between (as with YELLOW, reporting rates equal between the two projects).

"The 'PURPLE' (no SABAP2 coverage to date) concentrated in the Lesotho highlands and the former Transkei region emphasis the need for dedicated atlasing in these regions, especially for a species like the Cape Vulture that finds some of its last refuges in these remote and rural pastoral regions. The situation in the Western Cape is anomalous because a range retraction seems obvious but the single small breeding colony in this region (Potberg at De Hoop Nature Reserve) is apparently slowly increasing."

24000 records in the Virtual Museum for butterflies, and how to make lists of butterflies

Yesterday, Mary Lindsay submitted the 24 000th record to the Virtual Museum for butterflies at the ADU. The record consists of two photographs of Charaxes ethalion ethalion, the Coast Charaxes. One of the photos is displayed here. The photograph was taken in Scottburgh on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast. It is the southernmost record of the species in the Virtual Museum. There are 18 others.

The Virtual Museum for butterflies has continued to operate after the formal end of the SABCA project (Southern African Butterfly Conservation Assessment). The conservation assessment used all the records in the database until April last year. Subsequently, another 12 000 records have been added to the Virtual Museum. And the rate of growth is ever increasing. This Virtual Museum operates as a partnership between LepSoc (Lepidopterists' Society of Africa) and the ADU. Overall, the total number of records in the database is 356 981 – this includes not only the VM photographic records, but also the specimen records, both in museums and private collections.

You can make lists of butterflies for regions down to quarter degree grid cell level from the Virtual Museum database. Go the Virtual Museum website. Choose the butterfly virtual museum. Now go down the menu on the left, click on "Species lists." Next you enter the code for the the quarter degree grid cell (eg 3318BC Malmesbury) that you want a list of butterflies for. (There are other options, explained in the instructions, eg you can make lists for combinations of cells and for the countries Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland and for the provinces of South Africa.) These lists are drawn from the entire database of 356 981 records, and not only the Virtual Museum records. The list for 3318BC, the Malmesbury quarter degree grid cell, currently consists of 38 species. You can also get lists of reptiles and frogs from the Virtual Museum website in exactly the same way.

Anyone can access these lists – you don't need to be an ADU observer. But you do need to be registered as an ADU observer to upload images to the Virtual Museum. You only register once for all ADU projects. You click on "Registration" on the left hand side menu and fill in the form. If you take pictures of butterflies (or dragonflies, or mammals, or reptiles, or frogs, etc) please do upload them to the ADU Virtual Museums, where they add value to the largest databases of their types in South Africa. Every record is important, because it indicates that the species still occurs at that locality. This is especially telling when you bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of the records in the butterfly database are collection records, many of which are decades old. Quite a few bird atlasers submit records to the butterfly (and other) Virtual Museums, and we encourage more of you to do this too, and get more conservation impact out of the distances you travel to atlas.