DARTMOOR BIRD REPORT 2018 Peter Reay & Fiona Freshney
[email protected] Scorhill Mire (Gullaven Brook), the best Snipe site during the 2018/19 survey (Fiona Freshney) CONTENTS INTRODUCTION SOME NOTABLE RECORDS WEATHER REFERENCES LOOKING BACK TO THE 2008 REPORT SPECIES ACCOUNTS A SUMMARY OF CURRENT DARTMOOR BIRD RESEARCH 1 INTRODUCTION This report, like those for 2015 and 2017, replaces the Dartmoor Bird Report, published from 1996 to 2014 by the Dartmoor Study Group. It relates to the same geographical area covered both by its predecessors and The Birds of Dartmoor (Smaldon 2005). This comprises the area within the Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) boundary, with the addition of the china clay districts around Lee Moor, Shaugh Moor and Crownhill Down, left out of the National Park designation for political and business reasons. The bulk of the report comprises species accounts, but it also includes brief reviews of the weather in 2018, the Dartmoor Bird Report of 2008 and current Dartmoor bird projects and surveys. A more detailed description of the latter will appear in a Review of Dartmoor Bird Research 2018-19 to be published in Devon Birds in 2020 (Freshney & Reay, in prep.). The species accounts aim to provide a summary of birds recorded on Dartmoor in 2018. It is hoped that the production of the report will encourage more active submission of records and so help create a more complete picture of Dartmoor’s birds in 2019 and beyond. The records used are mostly those submitted to Devon Birds for 2018 (including those from the national BTO surveys) and assigned to the Dartmoor parent site.