Australia

Here’s the third Annual Challenge update – covering lists submitted between 1 January and 31 August 2016. If you have submitted eligible lists to eBird, you don’t need to do anything extra to be considered a participant–we’ve automatically included your lists in the tallies.

If you’re new to eBird Australia and haven’t heard about the 2016 eBird Australia annual listing challenges, they are listing challenges tailored to a wide range of bird observing personalities. Each challenge has specific listing goals, and can add an extra dimension to the satisfaction of seeing the accumulation of your listing efforts. Whether you’re a competitive birder who is eager to meet listing goals, or someone who enjoys watching birds whenever you can, it’s fun to see how your observations add up over time.

If you’re curious about how your lists are faring in the Annual Challenges as of the end of August 2016, check our status table. If you’re on track according to our progress guidelines (~66% of challenge goals), your values will be higher than the guideline values. Zeroes indicate submitted lists did not meet eligibility requirements.

We are pleasantly surprised to find that many eBirders have surpassed our expectations, having already met some of the challenge goals we set for gold, silver, and bronze level qualifications. But whether you or your birding group have, or have not, reached the progress guidelines or goals we have set–keep on birding. There’s more time this year, and also in the years to come, so there are endless opportunities for listing birds. Everyone has their own motivations for getting out and looking for birds. So keep recording the birds you find, and do submit those lists to eBird. No matter what your challenge standing is, we always hope you’re motivated to look for even more birds.

Annual challenges goals

a) The Prolific eBirder: submits many eligible lists in the year (Gold: 200; Silver: 100; Bronze: 50 lists).

b) The Consistent eBirder: submits at least one eligible list in many weeks of the year (Gold: 50; Silver: 40; Bronze: 30 weeks). Each week starts on Saturday, and partial weeks count too, so there are in fact 54 eligible weeks in 2016!

c) The Adventurous eBirder: submits eligible lists from many different locations in the year (Gold: 100; Silver: 50; Bronze: 25 different locations).

d) The Faithful eBirder: submits many eligible lists from a single location in the year (Gold: 50; Silver: 25; Bronze: 12 lists at a single location).

e) The Dedicated eBirder: spends many hours birding during the year (Gold: 200; Silver 100; Bronze: 50 hours).

f) The eBirder of the Year: achieves all five challenges at the gold level.

Eligibility requirements

An eligible 2016 list is (i) located in Australia, (ii) complete, with all species reported, (iii) created with an effort-based protocol, namely Travelling, Stationary, or Area search, (iv) 3 minutes or longer in duration, and (v) validated in eBird. Lists can be from hotspots or personal locations and can indicate bird abundance (numbers) or just presence (denoted by X’s), although we encourage eBirders to record numbers of birds instead of presence only whenever possible. For general advice on good practice, see the eBird help topic for making checklists more valuable. Please email any queries or questions to the eBird Australia team.

Annual Challenges Progress* Guidelines

*for 1 Jan-31 Aug 2016 (35.5 weeks, i.e. ~66% of year)

Annual Challenges Status Table