Urban birds of Lima, Peru: A 15-year dataset of birds in an anthropic area of western South America

Birds in the cities are usually one of the first ways people get in contact with nature. Birds are vertebrates that sometimes are very diverse in urban areas; monitoring them offers opportunities for education and scientific research. Capture and recapture of birds give important information on morphology and if it is done on a long-term basis with a census, on population dynamics. Here I present a dataset of birds that were counted by sight and also captured, banded and released with mist-nets through a monitoring program in an urban area of the city of Lima, Peru; from 1995 until 2010. It also includes records of re-sightings of banded individuals. The censuses were each week and the captures every month, most of the time. The study area had 0.5 Ha and was a private park that had exotic vegetation in different forms: pastures, shrubs, and trees. The data shows the bird censuses, captured individuals and banded individuals resighted. The presence of captured individuals is shown by band number (not all individuals and species were banded or measured), body condition and measurements. The body condition recorded were sex, molt and breeding status. The body measurements were weight, wing, tarsus, beak (total and exposed culmen) and tail. The sampling effort for the bird census was 296 days; half an hour per day. For the bird-banding was 4724.74 Hours-net, with a range of 4 to 107 Hours-net per month. The resighted individuals were 1438. I recorded 43 species in this park, the most common species sighted were Columbina cruziana, Zenaida meloda and Coereba flaveola. There were 1827 captures of 25 bird species, from 12 families, within the order Passeriformes, Columbiformes, Apodiformes, Psittaciformes, and Falconiformes. Individual records per species range between 1 to 395, the median was 16 individuals per species. Most of the birds that were captured were Coereba flaveola (21.6%), Passer domesticus (17.4%) and Volatinia jacarina (12.1%). The longest life spans recorded during this project were individuals of Volatinia jacarina (10Y,7M), Pyrocephalus rubinus (10Y,4M) and Coereba flaveola (9Y,7M). I expect this database to be helpful for researchers in population ecology and bird morphology.