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Posted by Bill Pranty on 18:09:04 05/06/09
Good evening,
I am updating the account of the Red-whiskered Bulbul for the revised edition of Robertson's and Woolfenden's "Florida Bird Species: An Annotated List" (1992), being updated by Jon Greenlaw and Reed Bowman.
The only study of bulbuls in Florida -- available at (http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v092n01/p0040-p0057.pdf), published by Allison Carleton and Oscar Owre in 1975, listed the bulbul's core range as "3.2 square miles." R&W listed the range as of the early 1990s as "about 25 square miles" but they provide no reference. Carleton and Owre estimated the total population as 250 bulbuls. Toops and Dilley (1996; "Birds of South Florida: An Interpretive Guide") claimed that the bulbul population had increased to 700 birds by the mid-1980s, but they provide no reference, and I doubt that total.
Given that noting about the bulbul population has been published in 34 years, I am going to TRY to map the limits of their range using whatever information I can gather from this list.
I don't expect too much, since virtually everybody (including I!) goes to the neighborhood north of Kendall Baptist Hospital, finds the bulbuls, and then quits looking for them. But I have no other way to get any recent information on bulbul range and/or numbers.
So this RFI is really geared to the few really active local birders who may see bulbuls away from popular or "known" areas. Please do NOT send me an email if you have seen one or two bulbuls north of Baptist Hospital.
I'm not necessarily interested in dates of occurrence -- but I'll take them if you have them, as well as any numerical counts (has anybody seen a winter roost in the past 30 years)?
I think that it would be best if we limited observations to the past five years (say, since Jan 2005). I'll need either street addresses or at road intersections to map the locations.
If all goes well, and I have enough locations to produce a nice map along the lines of what Carleton and Owre produced, then I'll share the map with the Bird Board.
Please send the locations to me directly to avoid cluttering up the Bird Board.
Thanks to all in advance.
Best regards,
Bill Pranty
Bayonet Point, Florida
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