WHAMB is the Welcome Home All Migrant Birds project

WHAMB stands for Welcome Home All Migrant Birds. We welcome both the intra-African migrants coming to southern Africa to breed, and the Palearctic migrants, coming here for their non-breeding season.

WHAMB a mini-project within SABAP2. It builds on the astonishing success of LAMP. WHAMB is like LAMP, the Long Autumn Migration Project, which we did in autumn, and like BASH, the Big Atlasing Summer Holiday, which we did in summer.

Besides the overall mapping of bird distributions in the atlas region, one of the objectives for SABAP2 is to help us to define the timing of migration. We live in an era of climate change, and one of the climate change predictions is that the timing of migration will change. For most of our migrants, spring is the arrival period. 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 Palearctic migrants, the species which bred in Eurasia during our winter, arrival tends to involve a slow build up of numbers. For many of these species arrival tends to be quite late in spring, which is why the end-point of WHAMB is set at 30 November. In contrast, for the intra-African migrants which come here to breed, arrival tends to be quite sudden, and tends to be earlier than the arrival of the long-distance migrants. In fact, by the end of July, there have 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 WHAMB at 1 August.

But for the mini-project WHAMB, we hope that as many atlasers as possible will also 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 400 pentads with at least 2 lists each, 150 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 WHAMBing 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: