Birding News and Features
Location! Location! Location!
Exactly where you plot your birding locations on the map is critical for eBird in many ways. When you are specific with your location information we can perform better analyses, and we can ensure that your birding lists are built correctly. eBird thrives on location specificity, and a good general rule of thumb when entering data is that it's always better to enter shorter checklists from more refined locations than longer checklists from a string of unrelated locations. In this article we'll discuss why being as precise as possible with your birding locations yields the best results.
eBird's Most Wanted Counties
Birders are not evenly distributed around the continent, and the same is certainly true for eBirders. There are some places, like Cook County, Illinois and Los Angeles, California, that benefit from having large populations. Birders have submitted over 21,476 checklists (341 species) for Cook County and over 19,000 checklists (489 species) for Los Angeles. But high populations alone don't always determine the number of checklists submitted. There are more checklists for Tompkins county, New York (24,285), than any other county--we suspect Cornell's location in the center of the county plays a critical role. And it's probably not too surprising that some exceptional birding locations like Cape May, NJ (14,197), rank high. Others benefit from a combination of factors: St. Louis, Minnesota, offers exceptional birding (home the Sax-Zim bog, Hawk Ridge, and Park Point); it's large (bigger than several eastern states) and benefits from the passionate participation of a small but dedicated number of eBirders. But there are other counties that are less well represented in eBird. We want your help to gather more information from those places.
eBird Express: New Excel tool to simplify data upload
We’re excited to announce a new tool for submitting your checklists to eBird. Jay Packer, one of our industrious eBird users created a tool to help upload checklists from Microsoft Excel--a tool that he’s appropriately named eBird Express. By writing code into an Excel template, Jay provides multiple levels of error-checking that will help you avoid any complications when uploading data to eBird. NOTE: If you are not familiar with Excel, this tool may not help you much. If you do use Excel, this tool helps to allow your bulk uploads to swiftly and easily upload to eBird without a hitch.
eBird Enters the Blogosphere!
A lot happens from day to day at eBird, and we want to share it with you. We've created a blog to enhance our ability to connect with our users, to address issues that arise from time to time, and to harness the power of the eBird community to better define the future direction of the project. Through the “Chip Notes – eBird Buzz” blog we hope to create an on-going dialogue with our users. We want to get to know you better, learn what you like about eBird and what you think needs improvement. We want to know why you use eBird, and we want to engage those who don’t to tell us why! We want to let you speak your minds about how we’re doing in providing this service to the birding community. Through collaboration, we’ll keep eBird evolving in the direction that best suits the needs of the birding community, all while keeping our internal focus on collecting valuable scientific data. We look forward to hearing from you!
What in the world is "Herring Gull (American)"?
Most species names in eBird are easily found with a glance at your field guide, but eBird also allows entry of a number of other birds (sometimes we call them 'taxa') whose names do not appear in any guides. These break down into three main groups: hybrids, spuhs, and subspecies groups. Hybrids all have the word "hybrid" in the name (e.g., Mallard x Gadwall (hybrid)) and all spuhs either have a "sp." (e.g., scoter sp.) or slash (e.g., Greater/Lesser Scaup) in the name. The subspecies groups, such as "Herring Gull (American)", are more complicated and explained in this article.
