Birding News and Features

Saving a Rare Songbird – Hemispheric Conservation Plan for Bicknell’s Thrush

New App has High Hopes of Helping Haiti

The vibrant painting of Haiti’s national bird, the Hispaniolan Trogon, glowing on the iPhone screen and its “cock-crow” call rolling from the speaker offer a stark contrast to the aftermath of January’s disastrous earthquake in Haiti. But the partners that joined together to create The Birds of Haiti and the Dominican Republic iPhone and iPod Touch application hope that a bit of avian beauty will raise much-needed funds for humanitarian aid in Haiti.

“With nearly 100 million birders in North America alone, we hope this will be a way for all of us to easily contribute to Haitian earthquake relief efforts and learn about the island’s amazing birdlife at the same time,” said Vermont Center for Ecostudies biologist Kent McFarland, who hatched the idea.

New Feature—eBird Checklist Sharing!

Do you find that you often bird with a group of friends or colleagues? Instead of each of you having to keep your own list and enter your joint birdwalks separately into eBird, Cornell has released an exciting new feature eBird Checklist Sharing that enables you to copy checklists to another user’s account with the click of a mouse. From now on, when you go birding with friends you can designate who will be keeping the list and that person can enter the eBird list for the group. That checklist can be shared with the group using just an email address or eBird username. And once a checklist has been shared, you can add or delete species observed so that the list represents just what YOU saw. This checklist sharing feature will be very handy for groups going out birding to celebrate International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD) this fall. Read on for more information.

Welcome to eBird Caribbean!

The Society for the Conservation and Study of Caribbean Birds and Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology come together to provide a "regional" portal to eBird—you can enter your bird observations for any country in the Caribbean region from this portal. eBird is a web-based database in which users can submit, save and explore their bird observations. It is an invaluable tool for birders, scientists, natural resource managers, and conservationists. With this application you can keep track of all your bird observations and at the same time contribute to expanding our knowledge of bird distribution and abundance in each country in the Caribbean. Launched in 2002, eBird is in use all across the Western Hemisphere, connecting a vast international network of eBird users. Over 50,000 checklists are submitted each month in the U.S., Canada and Latin America and the Caribbean. Some of you may already be using eBird with one of the other Caribbean portals available (Puerto Rico). If you are new to eBird we invite you to enter your observations and join this growing network of birding enthusiasts, ornithologists and conservationists.

Make Your Checklists More Meaningful!

As the eBird database grows by leaps and bounds, it is becoming ever more valuable. Your observations in the Caribbean can make a huge difference in our understanding of birds at many levels. Scientists and conservationists can analyze your data to find new patterns in bird distribution, abundance and population trends for threatend birds, endemics, residents and migrants. Although every record submitted to eBird is valuable, only observations with effort can be used in these more rigorous analyses, so we would like to promote several bird survey techniques that we consider most valuable in this regard. Make the most of your birding by conducting traveling counts, stationary counts and area counts in a more meaningful way. In this feature we'll give examples of how to make your observations in the Caribbean count for bird conservation!