Category: MigrantWatch summaries

In this section we explore species-wise break-up of observations on MigrantWatch for 2012-13 and compare them with the previous season’s patterns. (Note that the migration “season” is taken to begin on 1 July of one year and end on 30 June the next year.)

Top 20 species for 2012-13

Species	Records in 2012-13
Common Sandpiper	368
Grey Wagtail	298
White Wagtail	267
Pied Cuckoo	267
Barn Swallow	254
Rosy Starling	245
Wood Sandpiper	236
Blyth’s Reed-warbler	219
Western Yellow Wagtail	206
Greenish Warbler	203
Green Sandpiper	187
Western Marsh Harrier	173
Northern Shoveler	157
Northern Pintail	138
Hume’s Leaf-warbler	132
Whiskered Tern	128
Garganey	127
Brown Shrike	126
Western Black-tailed Godwit	120
Common Greenshank	119

Boldface indicates species that also figured among the top 20 during the previous season (see table below)

Species	Records in 2011-12
Rosy Starling	239
Pied Cuckoo	170
Blyth’s Reed-warbler	122
Common Sandpiper	119
Barn Swallow	117
Greenish Warbler	112
Wood Sandpiper	95
Ashy Drongo	93
Grey Wagtail	90
Western Yellow Wagtail	85
White Wagtail	79
Western Marsh Harrier	77
Common Kestrel	75
Booted Warbler	75
Green Sandpiper	71
Northern Shoveler	69
Brown Shrike	66
Eurasian Golden Oriole	59
Common Redshank	56
Asian Paradise Flycatcher	55

Zone-wise top 5 species during 2012-13

The top 5 species were considered separately for each zone (see table below). A look at this list indicates that the most-observed species vary appreciably according to zone. As there are very few sightings from the Northeast and the Islands, these zones are excluded from comparison.

North	Northwest	Central	South
White Wagtail	Rosy Starling	Common Sandpiper	Barn Swallow
Grey Wagtail	Common Sandpiper	Pied Cuckoo	Common Sandpiper
Hume’s Leaf-warbler	Greater Flamingo	Western Yellow Wagtail	Wood Sandpiper
Greenish Warbler	Western Black-tailed Godwit	Grey Wagtail	Blyth’s Reed-warbler
Grey-headed C. Flycatcher	Northern Shoveler	White Wagtail	Brown Shrike

Half of all observations logged by MigrantWatchers in 2012-13 belong to 24 of the 265 species tracked by MigrantWatch. Interestingly, this number has remained nearly constant across the past five seasons (range 19-24). This suggests that there are some species that are either more popular, or are more abundant, or are easier to detect than other species.

 

Next in the series: Sighting data

Here we look at number of sightings contributed and their geographical break-up for 2012-13 and compare these with the previous season’s figures. (Please note that the migration “season” is taken to begin on 1 July of one year and end on 30 June the next year.)

Number of sightings

During the 2012-13 season 9017 sightings were uploaded by MigrantWatchers, which was more than twice that of the previous season.

Zone-wise sightings during 2012-13

We have divided the country into very rough zones, as you can see below. In the 2012-13 season the Central zone accounted for most of the sightings, closely followed by the South. Although the NorthWest zone appears to lag behind, do note that this consists of only two large states, so actually is doing very well! Very few sightings came from the Northeast, and none at all from the Islands (Andaman & Nicobars, and Lakshadweep).

A marked difference from the previous season’s break-up was that Central zone overtook South in terms of the share of the sightings for 2012-13 (see below).

Zone-wise increase in sightings

All zones (except for Islands) showed an increase over the previous season’s sightings (see following chart). The Central zone recorded the highest increase in the number of reports (up 194% over previous season), followed by South and North. Although the number of reports is small, the trend for Northeast was positive (+44%) and we hope that many more sightings will pour in from this under-represented region in the coming seasons.

Top States 2012-13

Maharashtra, Karnataka and Gujarat returned the most number of sightings during 2012-13, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand (see table below).

State	Records in 2012-13
Maharashtra	2172
Karnataka	1851
Gujarat	1548
Madhya Pradesh	630
Uttarakhand	502
Haryana	355
Tamil Nadu	343
Delhi	272
Kerala	235
Chhattisgarh	228

For comparison, here are the details of the top 10 states during the previous season (2011-12).

State	Records in 2011-12
Karnataka	1013
Maharashtra	942
Gujarat	771
Delhi	230
Rajasthan	226
Kerala	179
Uttar Pradesh	126
Uttarakhand	113
Chhattisgarh	90
Tamil Nadu	82

Next in the series: Species records

Beginning with this post we present a series of articles that summarise the recently concluded MigrantWatch season (i.e. 2012-13), and compare it with previous seasons. 

In this part we look at our contributors for 2012-13 and examine changes in contributors over the years. In all cases, we define a “season” as starting on 1 July of one year and ending on 30 June of the next year.

Number of contributors

As shown above, the last season saw contributions from 273 MigrantWatchers, which is an all-time high.

Top contributors for 2012-13

Contributor	Records
Shantilal Varu	1331
A Shivaprakash	894
Prathamesh Desai	656
Dipu Sasi	593
Pradnyavant Mane	559
Sachin Shurpali	318
Jayant Wadatkar	316
Ramit Singal	302
Arun M. K. Bharos	274
B R Sheshgiri	260

Number of new contributors

134 new people joined MigrantWatch and started contributing during the last season (see list below). The number of new entrants has been picking up in the last three seasons. (The number of new contributors in the first season is, of course, the total for that season!)

New contributors in 2012-13

Aathira Perinchery, Abhijeet Avate, Abhijit Juvekar, Aditya Sawant, Ajay Dongre, Akhil Kulkarni, Alexia Aicha, Alok Marathe, Amitabh Cheekoth, Amit Kumar Ghosh, Amritansh Bhanot, Aneesh Kotwal, Anshul Jain, Aparna Jois, Appavu Pavendhan, Arun Agnihotri, Ashish Desai, Bhalchandra Pujari, Bhargav Dwarki, Biang La Nam Syiem, Binod Borah, Binu Balakrishnan, B R Sheshgiri, Chayant Gonsalves, Chinmay Rahane, Chockalingam Selvaraj, Darasingh Shyoran, Deepak Balasubramanian, Deepu Valathara, Devki Nandan, Dilip Nilakhe, Dr. Himmat Singh, Dr Kapil Paliwal, Faiz Rehman, Gaurav Kavathekar, Gauurav Abhay Bhide, Girish S. Jois, G Parameswaran, Hemant Kumar, Himanshu R. Sampat, Humayun Taher, Indranil Basu Mallick, Janet P, Kaajal Dasgupta, Kalyan Varma, Karthik M Kumar, Karthik Teegalapalli, Karurbadmi Srinivas, Kavitha P G, Kiran Bagade, Kiran Hedau, Kiran Kadam, Krishna Murthy, Kshitish Barada, Kuldeep Shukla, Kushal Kiran Kulkarni, Lloyd Nehemiah, Malik Mohammed Shabbir, Manish Kumar, Manoj K. Bind, Mehta Bhagirath Umeshbhai, Milind Sawdekar, Mittal, Mohan Moolepetlu, M S Sekhon, Munish Kaushik, Nabarun Sadhya, Nagraj, Narayan, Nil N. Mohite, Nishant Shah, Panchami Ukil, Pooja Yashwant Pawar, Prabhat Thakur, Prakash Garde, Prashant Murty, Praveen Bhat, Praveen Manivannan, Pronoy Baidya, Pushkar, Puttaraju Kenchappa, Rahul Jagtap, Rahul P Kumbhar, Raj Gopal Singh Verma, Ranjan Kr. Barthakur, Ravi Kailas, Ravi Meghani, Ravindrakumar Soman, Ravisankar Swaminathan, Rohidas Namdeo Dagale, Rohit Naniwadekar, Rohit Singh, Rosita Sequeira, S Anagha, Sanjay Diwakar Kulkarni, Sanket Dharashivkar, Santhosh Krishnamoorthy, Saravana Ganesh, Sathyanarayana Srinivasan, Shah Jahan, Shantanu Joshi , Shanthi Chandola, Shiraz Cambatta, Shirolkar BW, Shraddha Vyas, Shrikant M Khanadali, Shukla Ankit U., Sita rama Raju P, Sivakumar, S Karthikeyan, Sneha Dharwadkar, Somen Sarkar, Srijan Roy Choudhury, Srikanth A P, Subramanian Sankar, Sudhir Shukla, Sunil Bhavsar, Supriya Singh, Suvrat Sehgal, Swapnil Kuldiwar, Tallulah D’Silva, Tanaya Pai, Thorkild Michaelsen, Umesh Marudhachalam, Utkarsh Chowdhary, Venkatesh Kollipara, Vijay Ramachandran, Vinayak Parmar, Vinoba, Vinod Kumar, Vishnupriya Kolipakam, Yajuvendra Upadhyaya, Zenobia Driver

What percent of observers contribute 50% of all records?

During the past season half of all records were contributed by just 2% of the observers. (The proportion has more-or-less been maintained for the past three seasons.) This indicates that there is a very small number of MigrantWatchers that are exceptionally active. About 38% of contributors have uploaded a single sighting each, and this has varied slightly (i.e. between 32% and 41%) over the seasons. In the times to come we hope that we can motivate the not-so-active participants to contribute more regularly.

Next in the series: number of sightings contributed and their geographical break-up.