eBird News and Features

Fill in the gaps--bird the road less traveled this January

eBirders often email us and ask where they should go birding to make the biggest impact in regions with little data. It's perhaps little surprise that eBird checklist submissions are most dense in areas with large human populations, so getting away from those areas is a good first step for filling in the data gaps in eBird. But seeing these gaps can be really astonishing, and with the help of map wizard Paul Hurtado, we've come up with a neat way to visualize eBird data density at the county level. These maps are a visualization of the total number of eBird checklists submitted in each US county in the month of January across all years. Pull up your state map and see how your home county is faring. And better yet, find a county that's white, pink, or yellow, and go do as many eBird checklists as you can there this January!

eBird Update--Now embed photos in your checklists!

We're getting lots of emails requesting details on how to embed photos into eBird checklists so in case you missed it last time, here it is again! We are excited to report that it is now possible to embed photos within checklists from photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and Picassa! This not only makes the checklists look more attractive, but also makes it easier for reviewers to review and confirm your rare sightings. These images will be viewable in eBird checklists (accessed via My eBird and point maps), in eBird Alerts online, and will be accessible to eBird reviewers, making their job much easier. For example, the Lark Sparrow pictured here will be easy to confirm, and so will the other rarities seen on this day, including a local mega-vagrant at this location -- House Sparrow! View checklist.

eBirder of the Month: Zachary DeBruine

We have a fairly small team here at Cornell that develops eBird, and are blessed with a community of tens of thousands of eBirders who have even more ideas of how to improve eBird. One way we hope to expand eBird's functionality and appeal is to make it easier for everyone to access data. A couple years ago we released an eBird API, which gives programmers access to data from eBird to display it in new and novel ways. There are several gadgets and commercial applications that now use eBird data from this API. But one of our favorites was created and is maintained by a college student and this month's eBirder of the Month, Zachary DeBruine. 

eBird paper published in PLoS Biology

Thanks eBirders! You've done it again. Your active participation in eBird allowed us to publish a paper that highlights how eBird engages the birding community in science and conservation in one of the leading scientific journals in the world, PLoS Biology. We hope that this publication shows the ways that you (the eBird community) shape our thinking about eBird, and also demonstrates how your observations are being used by scientists and the conservation community. Because PLoS Biology is an open access journal, we encourage you to share this link and content with anyone interested in reading, reproducing, or distributing it. Feel free to translate it, post it to listservs, or put it to use in any other way. We hope you view the article here. 

eBird Rare Bird Alerts are here!

eBirding your Christmas Bird Counts

December 14 will begin the 112th Christmas Bird Count (CBC) season, and the first big weekend of counts will be 17-18 December. The Christmas Count is the largest and longest-running ornithological citizen science project. Its data are a great complement to what we are collecting in eBird, and indeed the CBC has paved the way for eBird in many respects. It is not a problem to enter data in eBird and then submit it for the CBC too, since the two projects are collecting data in similar ways, but at different scales. eBird can be a great way to store your sector-level data and compare it from year to year.

MEGA--Red-flanked Bluetail in California!

On 6 December, birders working on San Clemente Island off southern California found and photographed a Red-flanked Bluetail (Tarsiger cyanurus), only the second ever found in North America outside of Alaska! The Red-flanked Bluetail is an Old World species that breeds mainly in Siberia and winters in southeast Asia. In North America it is a rare vagrant mainly in spring to western Alaska, especially the Aleutians, but in recent years there also have been a few fall records for the Pribilofs and St. Lawrence Island. The only other record outside Alaska was of a juvenile male banded on Southeast Farallon Island, California, 1 November 1989. In the last 20 years Red-flanked Bluetail has expanded its breeding range westward, and records are increasing across Europe and especially in the UK. Read on to enjoy these birders' exciting account of the discovery and subsequent chase--in their words. Get a little taste of California birding at its best, and vicariously 'tick' this true Siberian MEGA-rarity!