Raptor Sightings

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Common Buzzard (c) John Fletcher

Your sightings of birds of prey in the county are hugely important to us and allow us to monitor these birds, analyse their numbers and locations and keep track of any potential problems within the different population groups. Over winter, understandably, there has been a slight decline in the number of sightings we have received and we’d like to see the number of sightings recorded to us to increase again – especially for the course of the breeding season.
We’ve recently made it easier than ever to submit your sightings with us. The first way you can do this is by filling in our online form which is quick and provides us with all the information required. Alternatively, on the same web page there is a downloadable Excel spreadsheet which can be filled in over the course of a set period of time and emailed to us regularly which many of you are using already and we thank you for this.
The benefits of submitting your sightings to us are numerous and include: monitoring numbers of the county’s raptor species; contributing to knowledge of numbers of successful nests and fledged young; building up a long-term dataset and many more. As well as this we pass on all of our records to the county bird recorder and your data will therefore contribute to the county database and the annual bird report.