Finally managed to pair up 3 hours of decent weather + no family commitments + no work this morning, and although I personally felt shocking after a flu jab (yep!) decided to do my "early winter visit" to my local BTO atlas square. The square includes a bit of Valley Park, Great Covert (which is renowned for Nightjar and Barn Owl), Some Turf Fields that are always full of birds, an excellent patch of wasteground, and the very east corner of Emer Bog.
This is the trickiest square of the three I have signed up for as the range of habitats is probably into double figures, and the survey wants a representative sample of all habitats in one hour. Think I just about cracked it today, the hardest habitat to enter was the housing estate! Spent the second hour of the survey scanning the unwatched corners of the square.
Highlight of the morning ironically won't make it into the survey as it was a "fly over" Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, but birds that did make it were Siskin, Stonechat, Linnet, and plenty of small flocks of Thrushes, Corvids, and Tits. Finished the survey at one of the farms where I know there is a small colony of House Sparrows, so got them on the count!
Next survey for me is a double-header of two tetrads on the Hampshire Downs. At least there are only a couple of habitats there, and by scoping large areas of farmland, I should be able to do a fairly comprehensive count. Downside is I'll need about 5 hours to complete this survey.
Printed off the survey forms for today, but wouldn't recommend using these in the field, they were a bit cumbersome compared with just writing in a notebook. Also the method of estimating numbers of species in the square based on the percentage that you survey is a bit strange, but the numbers I ended up with didn't look too ridiculous. i suppose as long as it is done consistently across the UK, and the same each year then the trends will still emerge. | 
