UK Bird Count - real time bird sightings

• Who are we?

  This site has been built by and is run by ornigraphy. The purveyors of the coolest British bird t-shirts in the world.

• Why doesn't my tweet appear?

  For one of a few reasons:
  1. This system fetches the latest tweets every 5 minutes but tweets are sometimes delayed so you may need to wait a little longer for your tweet to appear.
  2. If you haven't typed your tweet in the correct format then this web site may not be able to extract the information it needs to store your sighting and will ignore the tweet.
  3. Common mistakes can be: you have accidentally misnamed the species of bird, e.g. [thrush] would be ignored by the web site but [mistle thrush] or [song thrush-2] would both be recognised. Perhaps the postcode wasn't valid. You only need the first part e.g. ng3, EC1A, LE3

• Can I report just one bird?

  Yes, simply leave the number off the end of the bird species e.g. [house sparrow], [waxwing] and [bullfinch] would all report one bird.

• Can I tweet more than one bird species at a time?

  Yes. Simply put a comma between each species you want to report.

• Is it Ok to report common garden birds?

  Of course! All species are important. This site is meant for everyone whether garden bird spotter on a Sunday afternoon or full blown birder.

  We have nearly six hundred species of bird in our database to cope with all reported sightings (hopefully).

• What time scale are the bird reports on the map?

  By default the web site shows the last 14 days of reports but this may change depending on the number of reports tweeted.

• Can I change the time scales or species displayed on the map?

  Yes, just click on the "Filter by birds and dates" button and you can select a general date range going back three months, select specific dates and / or select one bird species.

• Why is the web site so slow?

  The speed of the site is influenced by how many markers need to be created (and how much information needs to be retrieved for each marker). Try filtering your searches to a shorter time span to reduce how many records need to be fetched.

• Can I use this web site to report birds in another country?

  No. Unfortunately this web site only tries to locate UK postcodes, but that doesn't mean to say that it can't be modified on a country by country basis if required...

• Are all of the reported bird sightings accurate?

  There's no way that the owner of this site can verify any of the bird sightings reported. Golden Eagles in Birmingham are unlikely though (although an escapee was seen there in 2010, so you never know...).

• Who do we need to thank?

  We would like to thank:
  Jamie Lambert - For the inspiration and enthusiasm.
  pocallaghan - makes it all look so simple

If this site is used and used often then the information stored about bird sighting and timings could be astounding.

Whether you're just looking to see what species have been seen in your area this week, want to check out if any of a particular species have been seen yet this year or want to set up a week long survey of your own with fellow twitter twitchers reporting their sightings of a particular species of bird.

The potential to do all of this and more is there for you to freely use, so please enjoy using this site.

If used for years then the facts and figures of bird population and locality could be enormously useful in protecting these birds for the future.

If you have any comments, suggestions for features, want to advertise, report a bug or just need to contact the owner of this web site.

george@ukbirdcount.co.uk