Urban birds of Lima, Peru: A 15-year dataset

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
<i>Columbina cruziana, Zenaida meloda</i>
and <i>Coereba flaveola</i>. 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 <i>Coereba
flaveola</i> (21.6%), <i>Passer domesticus</i> (17.4%) and <i>Volatinia
jacarina</i> (12.1%). The longest life spans recorded during this project
were individuals of <i>Volatinia jacarina</i> (10Y,7M), <i>Pyrocephalus rubinus</i>
(10Y,4M) and <i>Coereba flaveola</i> (9Y,7M). I expect this database to be
helpful for researchers in population ecology and bird morphology.