Birding News and Features

eBird & Flickr -- Share Your Bird Photos

You will notice that the eBird home page now includes several "thumbnail" images of rare birds that have been submitted to eBird. A few months ago we created a group within the popular photo-sharing site, Flickr. We received many requests from users who wanted be able to upload images of birds that they have photographed. This is particularly true for rarities (birds seen outside their normal range, or at an odd time of year). Our intent with this group is to provide a venue for people to photographically document species seen outside their normal range, outside their normal seasonal occurrence, or unexpectedly large counts of birds. The most recent images now appear on the eBird home page.

New Feature--eBird Checklist Sharing!

Do you have a group of birding friends that are all devoted eBird users? Has it been frustrating that each of you has to enter your joint birdwalks into eBird separately? We are very excited to release eBird Checklist Sharing, which now allows 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. Read on for more information.

Help Scientists Track Rusty Blackbird Migration!

Populations of Rusty Blackbirds are crashing! Their numbers have plummeted by as much as 88-98% over the last few decades, according to data gathered between 1966 and 2006 for the North American Breeding Bird Survey and Christmas Bird Count. A species that was once considered to be abundant is rapidly disappearing before our eyes. Your observations can help save this species by arming scientists with critical information about its migration ecology. Last spring we conducted a pilot study with the Rusty Blackbird Working Group where eBirders collected migration data over a one week period.  While the data collected were excellent, we found that short  survey window to be inadequate for gathering data from across much of the species' route. So this year we're broadening the net!  Birders across North America are asked to help scientists by recording Rusty Blackbirds during the entire fall migration period using eBird. Your observations of this species can help fill in the important missing pieces of this conservation puzzle!

BirdBase Export to eBird Now Available!

Peter Bono has written and made available a new BirdBase utility, called BB2eBird, that allows users to export BirdBase sightings records to eBird. As with the AviSys announcement just last week, we have worked closely with Peter on this process. Sightings of many trips -- some of which were entered in BirdBase with no idea that they would later be used by a project such as eBird -- can be uploaded in one operation, saving lots of time. We thank Peter and Bob Eisberg of Santa Barbara Software Products for their commitment to the citizen science goals of eBird, and, of course, we look forward to receiving lots of historical sightings data from BirdBase users everywhere!

New Handheld Device Compatible With eBird

Wildlife Computing has recently released new software that runs on Pocket PCs called Pocket Bird Recorder.  In addition to keeping bird lists, it is fully compatible with eBird data collection techniques, allowing users to gather meaningful data in the field using eBird's standardized protocol options.  Keep your sightings in the field electronically on any of the many Windows Mobile Pocket PC devices, HP iPaq, Dell Axim, etc.  Many cell phones, such as the Treo w series offered by Sprint, Verizon, and T-mobile, are compatible with Pocket Bird Recorder. After you’ve entered your sightings, the PBR program downloads and converts all your sightings and locations to a csv file stored on your computer.  After importing this file to eBird all your locations and bird sightings transfer rapidly into your eBird stats, and are then visible on the 'My eBird' pages.