Another Q for PMCA re: scout reporting

[Daniel Airola]

I know that the "Scout Report" only displays the first martin observed from each designated locality (city, town, etc.). I am monitoring 10-12 bridge nesting colonies in the City of Sacramento, and of these, I patrol 6 of these on a near daily basis looking for arrivals at scout time. My question is, does PMCA want reports of first arrivals at each colony within this area even if you only display the earliest arrival?

Given the low number of reports per year (generally 2-5 per year in CA, and 10-15 for the entire Western U.S.) maybe it would be better to have more records reported for use in calculating the average arrival date?

Conversely, the March 15 date shown in the scout report for Central California is generally correct, in that my first-scout dates for Sacramento as a whole have ranged from March 8 to March 18 over the last 4-5 years.

[Pat Kramer]

Dan,

We welcome multiple reports. Please send them all. I agree that more data is better than less.

Back when we typed scout reports into HTML pages by hand, we saved ourselves much time by having the policy that only the first reports would be shown for any given city. Now with our automated system, we allow all valid reports to stay in the online database and be shown as per the reporter's preference.

All reports will be included in the separate scientific database as they always have been.