Jeroen Reneerkens is a postdoc at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Among his responsibilities is the coleadership of the Sanderling Project of the International Wader Study Group. This projects aims to learn more about the migration routes, phenology and population dynamics (survival and recruitment) of Sanderlings in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Jeroen reports: "I've just received this photo of a female Sanderling. She was observed yesterday [15 May 2012] in North Bay, South Uist in Scotland. The photograph was taken by Craig Round. We caught and ringed her on 8 July 2003 as an adult in Zackenberg, in northeastern Greenland. I was with Theunis Piersma then as his PhD student, and it was my first time doing fieldwork in the arctic at Zackenberg. I added the colour-ring combination, six years later, in the 2009 breeding season. Her clutches hatched successfully both in 2003 and in 2009.

"She was observed in Walvis Bay, Namibia, on 11 and 13 December 2009 by Mark Boorman. If she, as most Sanderlings are, is faithful to her non-breeding area, she has flown at least 230 000 km in her life already! Amazing animals!"

Yesterday was mid-May, so this bird would have been on passage through Scotland during its migration back to Greenland, to arrive around the end of the month. Ring recoveries show that most of the Sanderling that spend the non-breeding season in South Africa and Namibia breed in Siberia in northern Russia. It is a comparatively recent finding that some unknown proportion of them turn west when they reach Europe and migrate to breed in Greenland.

Mark Boorman is an active SAFRING ringer, based in Swakopmund. All of us can keep a sharp lookout for birds of many species with colour rings and report them to SAFRING.

A workshop on PHOWN (Photos of Weaver Nests) will be held in Kenya, the country with the highest diversity of weaver species (over 60 species). A workshop will be held in Nairobi at the Nairobi National Museum from 28-30 May 2012. A second workshop will be held in Watamu on the Kenyan coast on 1-2 June. Anybody is welcome to attend!

PHOWN is a citizen science project of the Animal Demography Unit, to collect and monitor breeding distributions and colony sizes of weaver birds.

Photo: Golden Palm-Weaver, PHOWN 1533, submitted by D Rollinson

Program in Nairobi
To be held at the meeting hall in the Museum
The PHOWN workshop will be held with the usual museum outings. Contact Dr Peter Njoroge at pnjoroge [at] museums.or.ke
Mon, 28 May
    14h00 - Lecture 1: Weaver breeding biology
    15h00 - Tea
    15h30 - Practical: demonstration of uploading PHOWN records

Tue, 29 May
    7h00-11h00 - Bird ringing in the Museum gardens
    14h00 - Lecture 2: Photos of Weaver Nests project
    15h00 - Tea
    15h30 - Practical: uploading PHOWN records (for any participants that already have photos of weaver nests, with date and locality of the record)

Wed, 30 May
    8h45-12h30 - Bird walk, Kipande Rd
    12h30 - Practical: uploading PHOWN records from bird walk
    14h00 - Lecture 3 and discussion: PHOWN in Nairobi
    15h00 - Tea

Workshop details:
You will benefit most by attending all sessions, but if you can only come to one, or some of them, that is fine - come when you can!
Bring a laptop, if you have one. If you don't have a laptop, you can still come! Some materials will be provided that you can copy to your laptop.
Bring any photos of weaver nests you have, as long as you know the date and locality of the photos.
Bring a camera (and binoculars) to the bird walk.
Tea and snacks will be provided after the lectures for attendees.

Program in Watamu
To be held with Colin Jackson at the Mwamba Field Study Centre. Contact Colin at colin.jackson [at] arocha.org for details.

This workshop is funded by Project for the Enhancement of Research Capacity (PERC, University of Cape Town)

Of the Animal Demography Unit's array of bird monitoring projects, SABAP2 and SAFRING make the most obvious contribution to an understanding of bird migration. Without this understanding, there would be nothing to celebrate for World Migratory Bird Day this weekend! Bird ringing, and its various derivatives, have enabled us to understand which bird species are migrants, and to track the most amazing long-distance movements of these species across the planet. Bird atlasing, at least if it is done in the way we do it throughout the year in southern Africa, enables us to understand the timing of migration.

The World Migratory Bird Day was initiated in 2006 and is an annual awareness-raising campaign highlighting the need for the protection of migratory birds and their habitats. On the second weekend of May each, people around the world are encouraged to celebrate World Migratory Bird Day. Each year a theme is chosen, and the theme for 2012 is Migratory birds and people – together through time

It was not too long ago that we were starting to think there was nothing more to learn about the migration of the Barn Swallow or that of the Common Tern through bird ringing. There was enough information. If you read the species accounts in the published atlas for SABAP1, they all talk about the timing of migration as if it is set in stone for all time. This paradigm has changed. In January this year, a paper was published in the new journal Nature Climate Change (vol 2, pp 121–124), by Vincent Devictor and 20 other co-authors. It was titled Differences in the climatic debts of birds and butterflies at a continental scale and dealt with the extent to which species (the birds were mostly migrants) are failing to keep pace with increasing temperatures across western Europe. Their paper was based on a sophisticated analysis of citizen science data collected across seven European countries. The results are important in their own right, and highly relevant to the concept of World Migratory Bird Day. But is is the first sentence of the "Acknowledgements" in this paper that I want to highlight: "We thank all skilled volunteer bird- and butterfly-watchers involved in national monitoring programmes; altogether, we estimate that more than 1,500,000 man-hours have been spent to conduct the bird and butterfly monitoring surveys (this estimate only corresponds to field work) necessary to this study."

So I want to end by gently twisting the theme for World Migratory Bird Day for 2012, and changing it to Migratory birds and CITIZEN SCIENTISTS – together through time. The bird ringers and the bird atlasers, the prototype citizen scientists, are the special people who have a critical ongoing role to play in the monitoring of bird migration. So it is essential to find the funding to keep both SAFRING and SABAP2 alive as ongoing projects, empowered to process the data generated by our citizen scientsts, which monitors the impacts of land-use change, climate change, powerlines, windturbines, poisons, ..., on our migrant birds.

Yesterday, Mary Lindsay submitted the 24 000th record to the Virtual Museum for butterflies at the ADU. The record consists of two photographs of Charaxes ethalion ethalion, the Coast Charaxes. One of the photos is displayed here. The photograph was taken in Scottburgh on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast. It is the southernmost record of the species in the Virtual Museum. There are 18 others.

The Virtual Museum for butterflies has continued to operate after the formal end of the SABCA project (Southern African Butterfly Conservation Assessment). The conservation assessment used all the records in the database until April last year. Subsequently, another 12 000 records have been added to the Virtual Museum. And the rate of growth is ever increasing. This Virtual Museum operates as a partnership between LepSoc (Lepidopterists' Society of Africa) and the ADU. Overall, the total number of records in the database is 356 981 – this includes not only the VM photographic records, but also the specimen records, both in museums and private collections.

You can make lists of butterflies for regions down to quarter degree grid cell level from the Virtual Museum database. Go the Virtual Museum website. Choose the butterfly virtual museum. Now go down the menu on the left, click on "Species lists." Next you enter the code for the the quarter degree grid cell (eg 3318BC Malmesbury) that you want a list of butterflies for. (There are other options, explained in the instructions, eg you can make lists for combinations of cells and for the countries Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland and for the provinces of South Africa.) These lists are drawn from the entire database of 356 981 records, and not only the Virtual Museum records. The list for 3318BC, the Malmesbury quarter degree grid cell, currently consists of 38 species. You can also get lists of reptiles and frogs from the Virtual Museum website in exactly the same way.

Anyone can access these lists – you don't need to be an ADU observer. But you do need to be registered as an ADU observer to upload images to the Virtual Museum. You only register once for all ADU projects. You click on "Registration" on the left hand side menu and fill in the form. If you take pictures of butterflies (or dragonflies, or mammals, or reptiles, or frogs, etc) please do upload them to the ADU Virtual Museums, where they add value to the largest databases of their types in South Africa. Every record is important, because it indicates that the species still occurs at that locality. This is especially telling when you bear in mind that the overwhelming majority of the records in the butterfly database are collection records, many of which are decades old.

One of the most charismatic of the species whose fortunes are surveyed by the CAR project is the Blue Crane. This range-change map depicts the mixed fortunes of this species between the first and second bird atlas projects, SABAP1 and SABAP2. (The colours on this range change map are explained in the SABAP1 vs SABAP2 maps interpretation note.) The news is mixed. All the changes reported here are confirmed by the results of the CAR project. Apart from a handful of Blue Cranes in Etosha in Namibia, this species is endemic to South Africa, in part motivating the choice of this iconic species as the national bird.

This range change map shows that the decreases in the Grassland Biome have been sustained since SABAP1. David Allan, author of the Blue Crane species account in the first atlas wrote: "The grassland biome was the ancestral stronghold, but it has decreased c. 90% in this region [ie by 1997]. The SABAP1 map shows a fragmented distribution and low reporting rates in the grassland biome and shows almost total absence from Transkei and Lesotho, probably resulting from high human population densities. In the grassland biome the main threats are poisoning (prompted by birds feeding in agricultural fields), collisions with overhead transmission lines, and loss of habitat to afforestation, urbanization and crop farming." The range change map is alarmingly RED across the Free State, North-West Province, Gauteng, Limpopo and Mpumalanga; this means that it was recorded here in SABAP1, but not yet in SABAP2. The map is predominantly ORANGE across KwaZulu-Natal. The actual decreases in reporting rates between the two atlas projects are shown in the second map; SABAP1 reporting rates are at the top of each quarter degree grid cell, SABAP2 reporting rates at the bottom. Sadly, the fragmented distribution reported by SABAP1 is moving along the highway towards local extinction.

In the wheat-growing area of the Western Cape, both the Overberg and the Swartland, the almost wall-to-wall GREEN shows that increases in reporting rates have been widespread, and in the Swartland these increases have been massive. These are shown on the third map. David Allan noted: "In the fynbos biome it inhabits cereal croplands and cultivated pastures and avoids natural vegetation." In pristine times, the Blue Crane was absent from the Western Cape. Now this region is the stronghold of the species, and the birds are dependent on the present patterns of agricultural land use.

The third area in which the Blue Crane historically occurred was the Karoo. The range change map here is also predominantly GREEN suggesting that the Blue Crane is holding its own in the Karoo.

One of the papers in the 2011 volume of Ornithological Observations describes an expansion even farther north, into Namaqualand in the Northern Cape. These birds were recorded on cereal fields close to farmlands, suggesting that this range expansion, like that in the Western Cape, is associated with the changes in landuse associated with agriculture.