Please join us in congratulating Jan Meerman of Green Hills, Belize, the winner of the February eBirder of the Month Challenge, sponsored by Carl Zeiss Sports Optic. Jan submitted a total of 22 checklists this February from his Green Hills Private Protected Area patch. Here is a link to one of the winning checklists. Jan will receive a new ZEISS Conquest HD 8×42 binocular and a selection of books from Princeton University Press. When we notified him, he wrote back “This is such a tremendous thing! There is no way I can express how excited I am about this!” The photo at right depicts him with the newly described plant , which is named Zamia meermanii. We asked him to tell us a bit more about himself and how he uses eBird. This is what he wrote:
My name is Jan Meerman, and I live in the Central American nation of Belize. Here I operate the Green Hills Butterfly Ranch, which is being managed as a tourist attraction and a place where we breed and display numerous local butterfly species. Apart from butterflies, the site is great for other forms of wildlife, including of course, birds. It is an eBird hotspot with a total list for the property of about 280 species. With some effort, it is possible to see 90 bird species in a 24hr period.
In 2012, we discovered a Hook-billed Kite nest, which turned out to be the first nest of this species ever reported from Belize, which we described in this article in Solitarius, the newsletter of the Belize Raptor Research Institute. In 2013, the Belize Raptor Research Institute stationed some students at Green Hills in an attempt to gather more data on this enigmatic raptor. Amazingly, and only thanks to the tenacity of the team, the whole nesting process from placing the first twig in the nest to the fledging of (two) young, was documented.
Biodiversity forms an important part of my daily life. Apart from dealing with the butterflies, I carry out various environmental surveys from Environmental Impact Assessments to Biodiversity Surveys. On top of that, I am on the board of the Belize Raptor Research Institute and member of the Belize Bird Record Committee.
Not surprisingly, recording data is second nature to me. I actually maintain my own online biodiversity database, which holds more than 112,000 biodiversity records, but with the advent of eBird I have migrated all my bird data to eBird. For me, eBird is principally a scientific tool and correct date and location are thus critical to me. It is important to be able to link the various species with specific habitats or with protected areas. Once the data are spatially precise, eBird data become incredibly powerful for all sorts of conservation work, protected areas management, and risk assessments. Another field where I make use of the eBird data is when reviewing species reports for the Belize Bird Record Committee. Nowhere else can you have an overview, in the blink of an eye, of the likely range of a species based on actual data.
Jan with “Panama”, a male Harpy Eagle in the Belize Zoo reared by the Peregrine Fund. It is blind in one eye and cannot be released.