eBirder of the Month: Michael Hobbs

Michael Hobbs recently came to our attention because of his efforts to upload checklists from a single location in King County, Washington: Marymoor Park. He has been birding almost every week at the park for the nearly 20 years and has kept detailed notes of all individuals and all species. Over the past year, Michael uploaded these records into eBird. The result is that this great dataset of systematic surveys are now available.

Michael, on behalf of everyone at eBird, congratulations on being selected as our eBirder of the month.

Name: Michael Hobbs

Residence: King County, WA

Years eBirding: 2

eBird Life List: 210

Number of eBird Locations: 2

Number of complete eBird checklists: 708

From Michael:

Almost seventeen years ago, I decided to visit Marymoor Park, a local spot that was convenient, each and every week.  I had no ideas about doing any kind of grand scientific survey of the birds or anything like that.  I simply needed to get out birding more.  Scheduling a trip for every Thursday morning before work seemed like the best approach.

Being an obsessive-compulsive computer programmer type, I kept lists, of course.  And I'd written my own database program to track my sightings; this was before AviSys was even available, and long before eBird.  So each week, after my walk, I'd enter the species seen and a guess at the numbers.  Slowly, other people began to join me on my walks (most notably, Brian Bell, who has been along on almost all of them).

After a few years, I began to realize that the park bird list was getting pretty impressive, and the patterns of bird occurrence were pretty obvious in my data.  This was cool.  I could pretty much predict what common birds we'd see each week, and I could track things like a slow drop in the numbers of certain ducks, or in California Quail.

I began to take my surveys more seriously.  I made sure that Brian, or someone else, would cover for me if I was out of town.  I modified my database to be able to track more and more kinds of data.  The group of birders grew.  Parks management began to recognize birding as an important activity for park visitors.  Non-birders would ask questions, or share with me their sightings of birds.

But there was one big problem.  The number of surveys was getting up into the high hundreds.  I had tens of thousands of bird records that, taken together, painted a pretty compelling picture of the bird populations of the park.  But all of that data existed only in my own, custom database, on my computer at home.  I put some summary charts on my website, and I contributed some of my data to the University of Washington. But most of the information remained private, closed off, inaccessible.

When I heard about eBird, and saw how it was reaching a critical mass, and how many birders were using it, I decided to get my data onto eBird.   It was a touch tricky to enter the historical data, only because I hadn't anticipated some of the data requirements.  I decided that, as much as possible, I'd report each of my weekly visits as Area Counts.  I had to reconstruct some of the information that the Area Count protocol asks for, such as start time, duration, and number of observers.  I had most of that data, but I had to, for instance, manually count up the observer names I'd listed for each of hundreds of visits.

The result?  Using eBird's import wizard, I've now uploaded over 40,000 sightings, and everyone can now view the resulting bar charts, etc.  I'll soon be able upload each week's sightings automatically to eBird.  My data is no longer stuck in the black hole of my home computer.  And maybe other people will be encouraged to do their own long-term survey of a favorite location.

When I started birding at Marymoor Park, many local birders were skeptical that it was even a worthwhile place to bird.  Some of them had written it off as literally "gone to the dogs", because it hosts one of the largest suburban off-leash dog areas in the country.  But I liked birding there, and the birds seemed to like being there too.

My first rare bird, a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher in 1999, was only the 5th sighting of the species in Washington State.  Birders began to take notice.  They really perked up when a Buff-breasted Sandpiper spent several days on a grass soccer field in 2005 (while I was out of town).  A Baltimore Oriole (4th state record) was found in 2006, followed a couple of months later by Washington State's only record of Smith's Longspur.  We've had many birds rarely found in western Washington, species usually being restricted to the dry side of the state, such as Sage Thrasher, Sage Sparrow, and even Burrowing Owl.  Twenty species of sparrow, eleven species of flycatcher, and eight species of owl have kept things interesting.  The park list is now at 215, not bad for a single square mile of heavily used park, surrounded by suburbia.

Birding in one place has been a fantastic thing to do.  The park feels like home.  I know the birds and the trees and the bushes. Birding one location seems to be the best way to learn birding by ear.  I've learned things like the relationship between the lake water level and the spots that Virginia Rails hang out, and the weather patterns favored by Black Swifts.  I know which twigs are favorite perches for Anna's Hummingbirds and Northern Shrike.  

The charts of the combined data from all of the visits make the seasonal occurrence of the birds in the area easy to see.  Who knew that the best time to see Say's Phoebe around here was the 4th week in March, or that our Mourning Doves show clear spring and fall pulses, as if they migrate?

My focus on the park was a triggering factor in the decision by Eastside Audubon to adopt the nature trail at the park.  The city of Redmond, which surrounds the park, includes a yearly report I prepare on the birds of Marymoor Park in their annual assessment of the city.  Park management now regularly considers possible impacts on birds when development is considered.  And I've gotten to meet and bird with a lot of really great people at "my park".

Click here to view the bar charts for Marymoor Park.

More information about my Marymoor Park surveys can be found at www.marymoor.org/birding.htm

Past winners of the eBirder of the Month are feature here:

http://ebird.org/content/ebird/about/past-ebirders-of-the-month