Mike mentioned earlier that I would show you an electronic way to keep your bird checklists organized forever, as well as contribute to the largest “citizen-science” databases out there. The tool I am referring to is called eBird (<http://ebird.org>), an internet-based checklist database for georeferenced bird observations. It allows you to pinpoint your birding location on a map, enter all of the species you saw, and saves it (as well as any comments) for future reference. It also adds those records into a database that helps scientists examine questions about bird distribution and abundance.
The cool thing about eBird is that you can actually look at all of the data that has been entered by anyone submitting a checklist; for example, if you wanted to go out and look for a Common Loon in New York State, you could generate a map of where loons had been seen (and not seen), as well as when they were seen. It also keeps track of all of your checklists, and allows you to visualize your own observations, too.
I made an account specifically for our class to record our observations each class
- Navigate to ebird.org and enter the name “COE_Birding” with the same thing as password.
- Click on the “My eBird” tab to see how many species of birds we have seen, click on “Manage my observations” to view individual checklists, etc.
- If you want to see what’s been reported here in Sapsucker Woods, you can click on the “View and Explore Data” tab, click on “Bar Charts”, and click on “New York” as a state, and the Hot Spots radio button. After hitting continue, scroll down or search for Sapsucker Woods, click the box, and hit continue.
- What you get is a display of how frequently a given species is seen in each month (the thickness of the green bars indicates how frequently a given species is seen). The species total in the upper left is how many species have been reported here in SSW during the entire year, combining all observations from 1900-2007. You can change the date range, the location, even the individual species you want to look at.
Click on a species (e.g. Wood Duck) and you will get a graph showing the actual frequency of how often a wood duck has been seen on a given date. You can even scroll down and see how many checklists have been submitted on a given day; for example, there have been 49 checklists submitted with the date March 22 during Jan-Dec, 1900-2007.
I would suggest each of you to sign up for your own account (it’s free, and there is no email unless you report something very rare–in which case they contact you to get more information on your sighting) and start using it to track your birds when we’re not in class. Next year you’ll be able to look back at when you saw your first phoebe, or when the first hummingbird or sapsucker arrived that you saw, when the geese came back, etc. Plus it all feeds into the big database and gives us even more data to understand where birds go and how many of them are out there.
My plan is to have one of you enter the class list each week and send the email out to class members (unless someone would rather not be emailed the list) or post it here to the blog. At the end of the class we will be able to chart how many species we’ve seen as a class, and see the change in species composition due to location, weather, migration timing, or perhaps even the improving skill of classmembers’ birding skills.
