2 thoughts on “Rufous-tailed Lark (Ammomanes phoenicura)”
Encroachment of lake bed area for agricultural activities. Changes in crops from millets to commercial crops could be the reason in our part that is Mysuru, Karnataka, India.
Places like Narasambudhi, Nanjangud taluk, Mysuru, where we were seeing them each time we visited. Now they are almost not sighted. https://ebird.org/species/rutlar2/IN-KA-MY
This is another rushed reassessment based on data with poor spatial coverage. Rufous-tailed Larks are common across agricultural landscapes in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, including open areas within cities and university campuses. There is no evidence of decline or disappearance at any of these areas in the time I have observed them.
More broadly, eBird checklists should not be used as a guide to make decisions such as this in places with poor spatial coverage, especially in large countries such as India. At best ebird checklists should serve as an impetus for rigorous, quantitative surveys by qualified observers, and not as fodder for assessments of true status. It may well be that the species is declining…eBird checklists cannot be used to arrive at this conclusion. The data are simply not good enough. The Macaulay Library lists 2754 photos from India in the date range you mention, many of which are duplicate photos of the same individual. The actual, physically verifiable observations will therefore be much lower, perhaps 1500 over seven years. How can this be used to infer a decline with any confidence? What are the confidence intervals of the calculated decline, what is the variance? How might they differ from a randomized distribution of records? Maybe this data is in SoIB, but if being used for a Red List assessment, it should be reported with transparency here!
Encroachment of lake bed area for agricultural activities. Changes in crops from millets to commercial crops could be the reason in our part that is Mysuru, Karnataka, India.
Places like Narasambudhi, Nanjangud taluk, Mysuru, where we were seeing them each time we visited. Now they are almost not sighted.
https://ebird.org/species/rutlar2/IN-KA-MY
This is another rushed reassessment based on data with poor spatial coverage. Rufous-tailed Larks are common across agricultural landscapes in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, including open areas within cities and university campuses. There is no evidence of decline or disappearance at any of these areas in the time I have observed them.
More broadly, eBird checklists should not be used as a guide to make decisions such as this in places with poor spatial coverage, especially in large countries such as India. At best ebird checklists should serve as an impetus for rigorous, quantitative surveys by qualified observers, and not as fodder for assessments of true status. It may well be that the species is declining…eBird checklists cannot be used to arrive at this conclusion. The data are simply not good enough. The Macaulay Library lists 2754 photos from India in the date range you mention, many of which are duplicate photos of the same individual. The actual, physically verifiable observations will therefore be much lower, perhaps 1500 over seven years. How can this be used to infer a decline with any confidence? What are the confidence intervals of the calculated decline, what is the variance? How might they differ from a randomized distribution of records? Maybe this data is in SoIB, but if being used for a Red List assessment, it should be reported with transparency here!