I had difficulty even deciding which sampling strategy to use as the example data sheets both used quadrats for the amount of vegetation species. Eventually I decided on the point count sampling. I spent every Saturday once a month tracking the birds in each location for 10 minutes for a total of 30 minutes collecting data. The data did not surprise me as a lot of the birds whose presents were higher were birds that are extremely common in this area. I need to find a way to track the minutes that the birds are present in the yard. I think I will slightly change my approach by tracking the time of the presents and the amount of species, not just presence or absence. I would also like to increase the frequency that I do trials from once a month to every 2 weeks to increase my total trials. I think I should also track the weather that occurs on the day that the trials take place to see how weather influences the abundance. The next tests I do will be done with the absence and presences of dogs to see how that affects bird abundance.
I can’t remember what your question is exactly, but you could do your point counts more frequently – every day or every few days unless you want to wait a longer period of time to capture the changing season. If not, it is probably better to do closer together as weather will have a big impact on bird activity I expect as well as time of year.