[ACSA] Bathing Birds is published!

Unfortunately the list doesn’t allow pdf attachments, so it’s been removed. Here’s the abstract:
Private gardens provide habitat and resources for many birds living in human-dominated
landscapes. While wild bird feeding is recognised as one of the most popular forms of
human-wildlife interaction, almost nothing is known about the use of bird baths. This citizen
science initiative explores avian assemblages at bird baths in private gardens in south-eastern
Australia and how this differs with respect to levels of urbanisation and bioregion. Overall,
992 citizen scientists collected data over two, four-week survey periods during winter
2014 and summer 2015 (43% participated in both years). Avian assemblages at urban and
rural bird baths differed between bioregions with aggressive nectar-eating species influenced
the avian assemblages visiting urban bird baths in South Eastern Queensland, NSW
North Coast and Sydney Basin while introduced birds contributed to differences in South
Western Slopes, Southern Volcanic Plains and Victorian Midlands. Small honeyeaters and
other small native birds occurred less often at urban bird baths compared to rural bird baths.
Our results suggest that differences between urban versus rural areas, as well as bioregion,
significantly influence the composition of avian assemblages visiting bird baths in private
gardens. We also demonstrate that citizen science monitoring of fixed survey sites such as
bird baths is a useful tool in understanding large-scale patterns in avian assemblages which
requires a vast amount of data to be collected across broad areas.

Peter Shute

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