Recent Ringed Kingfisher Sightings in the Texas Hill Country

TexBird Archives has over 700 records from 1998 through 11/2005 of Ringed Kingfisher sightings in Texas.
Of these, about 140 fall outside south Texas, the Rio Grande, and the coastal plain.
127 of these records have location descriptions good enough to spot the distribution.(located to better than a half-mile)

Records
Click here for an excel spreadsheet of those records.  The "ID" column will match red text ID nunbers on the maps.
For full records, go to the TexBirds archives and query postings near the sighting date for the record of interest.

Distribution
This statewide view shows the distribution of those 127 post-1997 sightings.
This medium scale view has a few outlying sightings labeled in red ID numbers.  Those numbers will match the "ID" numbers (not the quantity numbers)
in the excel table
This close-up view of the hill country has most sighting records IDs labeled in red . The upper Frio and middle Guadalupe rivers seem under-represented.
Those being the most popular tubing stretches, perhaps either the birders do not like tubers and do not bird there, or the kingfishers do not like tubers.
Nearly half the records are from Austin birders logging the birds around their town.
This view is of the Austin area showing the record distribution these birders have provided.  Note the 25 records from Hornsby Bend alone.

Abundance throughout the Year
This chart plots sightings per month.
The chart shows about double the sightings in winter as compared to summer.

Abundance throughout the decade
This chart clearly shows the birds have doubled or tripled their numbers in less than a decade in the hill country.

Range extension
When the sighting dates are color coded, the pattern seems random.  So the range extension cannot be seen in the narrow 1998-2005 data set.

Conclusions
The symmetrical shape of the monthly abundance curve (no peak just after nesting season), suggests the lack of breeding records for the hill country reflects reality.  Perhaps a few breed but not enough to show up in the abundance numbers.
Range extension  north and northeast during this decade has been much slower than the increase in abundance of the birds within the hill country.
Abundance within the hill country has at least doubled this decade.

Thanks to TexBirds for archiving all those postings and for allowing the archives to be queried.
Thanks to the birders of the state for posting their sightings to TexBirds.