Please Help Establish Spring Timing and Increase the Value of your Atlasing Legacy

PHESTIVAL stands for Please Help Establish Spring Timing and Increase the Value of your Atlasing Legacy. This mini-project will run for four months from the beginning of August to the end of November. The arrival period of migrants is long. Firstly the intra-African migrants arrive in the SABAP2 area from August onwards, and many of them breed here. Later on the PHESTIVAL period, the Palearctic migrant start arriving in bulk, coming here for their non-breeding season.

FESTIVAL is a mini-project within SABAP2. It builds on the astonishing success achieved by last year's WHAMB project in which we Welcomed Home all Migrant Birds in spring last year. Our earlier mini-projects were BASH, the Big Atlasing Summer Holiday (midsummer 2008/09), LAMP, the Long Autumn Migration Project (autumn 2009), DeJaVU, the December-January Atlasing Vacation Unlimited (midsummer 2009/10), PHEAT, Please Help Establish Autumn Timing (autumn this year), and the newly completed GOALS (GO Atlasing and Love Soccer) which we did during the World Cup this winter.

What these mini-projects within the great SABAP2 project help us to do is this. The overall mapping of bird distributions in the atlas region is the primary objective for SABAP2. But the mini-projects are helping us to demonstrate that atlasing can be transformed into something that no one anywhere has attempted on our scale before. We are showing that atlasing, SABAP2-style, has the power to become a monitoring project, tracking changes in bird patterns in space and in time. For example the annual spring and autumn projects enable us to quantify the time of arrival and departure on migrants in a precise way across the atlas region. This is important, because we live in an era of climate change, and one of the climate change predictions is that the timing of migration will change. Atlasing, SABAP2-style, is the most brilliant way to monitor the timing of migration. As migrants arrive, numbers build up and you encounter them more frequently, and they gradually start to occur closer to the top of the atlas list.

For the intra-African migrants arrival tends to be rapid, and mostly much earlier than the arrival of the long-distance migrants. In fact, by the end of July, there are already been a few reports of the arrival of some of the swallow species which breed here. This is why we have set the starting date for PHESTIVAL at 1 August. For the Palearctic migrants, the species which bred in Eurasia during our winter, arrival tends to be late in spring, and to involve a slow build up of numbers, which is why the end-point of PHESTIVAL is set at 30 November.

For FESTIVAL, we hope that as many atlasers as possible will choose to go “deep”, and atlas the pentads which are most accessible to them as frequently as possible (bearing in mind of course that five days need to elapse before you start a new checklist for a pentad).

We hope that there will be more than 500 pentads with at least 2 lists each, 200 pentads with at least 5 lists each, 60 pentads with at least 10 lists, 25 pentads with at least 15 lists and 10 pentads with at least 20 lists each.

How about setting yourself the target of atlasing your favourite pentad every weekend this spring?

But the greater SABAP2 project also continues. We dearly want atlasers to go "wide" and to cover the pentads which have not been atlased. So we have set "wide" targets as well for the four month period: