Bird counts from McAleer property in northern wheatbelt of Western Australia

From the first week in May 1987 until the end of 2002, Mr McAleer collected data on every species of bird he saw each week on his property "Woopenatty" in the Northern Wheatbelt of Western Australia. Data were recorded on a booklet prepared by CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Rangelands Research for its 1987-1990 bird atlas (Saunders and Ingram 1995). This booklet provided a list of all species known to have occurred in the central wheatbelt and divided the year into 12 months and each month into four weeks; that is, each year had 48 weeks of potential observations. Any species seen on Woopenatty that was not listed on the booklet was added to the list. Mr McAleer also made notes about his observations at the back of each year’s booklet. These notes, together with the raw presence data, comprise this data set. The data recorded each week consisted of a tick (given as 1 in the data here) for every species seen that week. For example, one Red-capped Robin seen once during a week was recorded as a tick, as were 100 Galahs seen every day of that week.\nLineage: Mr Tony McAleer started collecting data on every species of bird he saw on his property Woopenatty in the northern wheatbelt of Western Australia from May 1987, and continued until he left the property at the end of 2002. Initially the data were collected as part of a CSIRO Division of Wildlife and Rangelands Research program conducted from 1987 to 1990. This was conducted by Dr Denis Saunders and Mr John Ingram. Mr McAleer continued collecting the data after the cessation of the CSIRO project, and the data from 1991 to 2002 were supplied to Denis Saunders by Dr Nan Broad (Mr McAleer’s widow). Mr McAleer died in 2007 and Dr Broad requested the data be analysed and archived for others to access them.