#wildcounts — Public Fediverse posts

I've been counting birds on my bike work commute between Christchurch and Lincoln, NZ, since 2003. On Friday, I counted my *first ever* Kōtuku Ngutupapa, Royal Spoonbill, on the route.

It was feeding in a paddock that had been recently scraped clear preparing it for a housing subdivision, but in the meantime had filled with water after a heavy rain. There are also restored wetlands nearby that I hope was what attracted it in. Perhaps there will be more.

#birds #nz #spoonbill #EcologicalMonitoring #wildcounts #UrbanEcology

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/340743507

We live in an age of unprecedented, rapid environmental change. One of my personal responses to this, as a trained ecologist, has been to consistently count as many of the changes in nature around my city as I can. I've got a series of regular routes around the city where I map and count all birds, butterflies, assorted other insects, plants and fungi, and vertebrates. Hence "JonCounts".

I just tallied up my biodiversity surveys and observations from 2025:

52 weekly and 12x2 monthly run routes: total distance 1,095 km
240 daily and 12x3 monthly bike routes: total distance 6,898 km
225,516 species observations, including transcriptions from 466 hours of field audio notes
~60,000 photos
1,225 audio recordings of species vocalising

that's plus my automated AudioMoth recordings and monthly timelapse phototransects

This creates an enormous amount of data curation work, which I typically chip away at over my summer holidays, like now (at the moment I'm correcting errors in the automated transcriptions).

#wildcounts #nz #EcologicalMonitoring

The last three days I've been along the Port Hills of Ōtautahi-Christchurch, NZ, doing my monthly biodiversity surveys. Saturday was my 117th run up through Victoria Park and Sugarloaf, and today was my 80th bike ride along the Summit Road from Cashmere.

Since September this year I've added 27 AudioMoths along the routes to record bird songs, so now I come back with an iPhone filled with audio notes, a camera filled with photos, and now a pocket filled with bird songs to analyse.

Here are some photos of the scenery from each of the three days, plus today's handful of bird song.

#EcologicalMonitoring #nz #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #wildcounts

Today I did my monthly biodiversity run up into the Port Hills of Ōtautahi-Christchurch city, NZ. That takes my out of the Cashmere suburbs through the planted native forest and grasslands of Victoria Park and up into the old growth and naturally regenerated native forest of Sugarloaf peak.

I've been doing this route monthly since 2016, mapping and counting out birds and butterflies and assorted plants and fungi.

Here are some of today's highlights.

I had a close encounter with a kererū, perched about 1 metre from me (always a treat): https://inaturalist.nz/observations/297848998

A kahukura (red admiral) was feeding from exotic Viburnum flowers: https://inaturalist.nz/observations/297849009

Some scarlet pouch fungi were lighting up the forest floor on Sugarloaf: https://inaturalist.nz/observations/297848989

The one taramea (Aciphylla subfabellata speargrass) that I know of is still up by the Summit Road and looking healthy: https://inaturalist.nz/observations/297848991

#nature #WildCounts #UrbanEcology #EcologicalMonitoring

Check out what I saw on my afternoon run through Cashmere, Christchurch, NZ.

This was on one of my fortnightly ecological survey runs through the city, 12 km, which I started in 2008. Today is the first time I have seen a tūī on this route!

Yeah!

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/289447711

#birds #tui #nz #EcologicalMonitoring #wildcounts

Here are four of the native birds from my weekly #wildcounts while hanging out or bringing in my laundry.

Korimako (NZ bellbirds) are trending up, and are more often in our garden in the winter.

Piwakawaka (NZ fantail) are doing the same.

Kererū (NZ wood pigeon) are much more common than they were originally. It wasn't until 2017 that I counted my first kererū from the laundry line.

Riroriro (grey warbler) are declining (and I don't understand why).

(Tauhou, the silvereyes, which I've not added a graph for here, are abundant and show no long-term trend.)
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#EcologicalMonitoring #wildcounts #nz #birds

Here are four of the local butterflies from my weekly #wildcounts while hanging out or bringing in my laundry.

Kahukura (NZ red admiral) are trending up, and are more often in our garden in the summer.

Native coppers are trending down (here I've combined the winter copper and glade copper as I don't always stop to chase them to ID which species it is). I don't understand this as their host plant grows nearby.

NZ blues are trending up. I didn't see my first one from the laundry line until 2022 and I've them occasionally since.

Monarchs (the American species, which is wild here) show no trend (we don't plant swan plants so they just fly through).

(The Australian Yellow admirals show no trend, and I see them less frequently than the NZ endemic kahukura.)
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#EcologicalMonitoring #wildcounts #nz #butterflies

Just before Covid knocked me over at the end of last week, I was fortunate to present a talk at the AGM of the Summit Road Society. That's the long-running local community group dedicating to maintaining and restoring the nature and heritage of Christchurch's Port Hills (NZ).

I was asked to talk about how nature has been changing in the Port Hills. Since I live in the hills, I started my talk with our garden. The laundry line, to be exact.

Every time I hang out or bring in our laundry, I count the local birds and butterflies. I've been doing that consistently since March 2012. It allows me to easily see how nature is changing in my garden.

I hadn't updated my graphs since 2023. To keep things simple, the graphs and analyses I showed just use the presence/absence of each species each time I'm at the laundry line (although I also make counts). If you didn't want to count individuals, you could just tick presence/absence and you'd also start to see trends.

I call this kind of simple, consistent, high frequency counting of nature, #wildcounts.

You might be interested in the trends that are appearing. Some species are trending up, others are down, and I don't always understand why.
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#NZ #EcologicalMonitoring #Ōtautahi #Christchurch

I was at home with online meetings today. Some people doodle. I sit by an open window and jot down when I see and hear my favourite wild animals.

It's often quickest to write on paper and enter later. I just typed in today's notes, mostly NZ bellbirds (Bellb) plus fantail (Ft).

I also track the bellbird song types. The main local male song is "doot Doot DEET Doot DEet doot" and females were singing "DEET DOot DEEt Doot DEet".

I know it's odd. 😄

#EcologicalMonitoring #wildcounts #nz #birds

I'm off to bed but my computer cranks on. It's using #BirdNet to ID all the bird songs recorded by our garden's #AudioMoth from the first half of the week, while an R script is hooked into AWS to transcribe the 772 geotagged audio notes I made today on my monthly 12 km run up from the city through Victoria Park and around the native forest on Sugarloaf peak.

Some parts of our crazy Big Tech timeline I'm OK with. 😄

#wildcounts #EcologicalMonitoring #nz

"chongli me to hi one"?

I've just automatically transcribed my 19,848 audio notes from November, from my ecological surveys around Ōtautahi-Christchuch, NZ. I spoke nature observations into my phone for 3065 minutes (51 hours), mostly while biking and running.

Now I've got some data cleaning to do. Most transcriptions come through spot on, or close to it, but the odd one is like "chongli me to hi one". Here I said "chaffinch song left mid ahead one".

#wildcounts #EcologicalMonitoring #nz