Thank you to all of our Members who have taken up tetrads for the survey.

For those who haven’t and might wish to contribute, there is still plenty of time to contribute. We are approaching 40% in take-up rate of tetrads, which is excellent but it would be good to add even more.

Negative results are as useful as positive.

The section on the survey on the SOS website now shows the breeding map for Rooks from the Somerset Atlas. It will be useful to anyone who wishes to compare them with the tetrad map for the current survey. There is of course no guarantee the rookeries will still be there.

At present there are large gaps in coverage for the area south-east from Taunton to Yeovil, from Street east towards the county boundary, the Quantocks and large parts of Exmoor.

The survey tetrad map is at https://app.bto.org/batmap/squares/somerset#

The start of the survey period is almost upon us and there are still plenty of unallocated tetrads.

We’ve now added to the Surveys page of the website - https://somersetbirding.org.uk/surveys  - a document listing tetrads in which Rookeries were located in 2021 but had not yet been allocated in the new survey.

There’s still lots of tetrads available, so please take part if you can.

You can still help even if you don’t know of any rookeries, since negative data is also very useful.

Somerset is a well-wooded county with plenty of livestock farms, suggesting that Rooks should be a relatively common farmland bird in the county. During the Somerset Atlas of breeding and wintering birds 2007 – 2012, confirmed breeding records of Rooks were received from 53% of tetrads in the County.  However, since then records of rookeries reported in Somerset Birds are very few and far between. Are we failing to record most of our Rookeries, or have they simply vanished from the County?  We need to check, so here is the BTO Somerset & SOS Rookery Survey! 

The survey will take place from 1st March to the end of April this year., so we are seeking volunteers to survey squares. For full details, go to https://somersetbirding.org.uk/surveys