eBirder of the month - Rob Ostrowski

Our acknowledgment of Rob must also acknowledge the remarkable teamwork on behalf of eBird that exists in his home state of Maryland. Although Maryland is small (the 8th smallest state with the 19th largest population), statewide monthly checklist contributions consistent rank among the top 5! This is due to a tight-knit state community of birders with an enthusiastic core group of eBird users that consistently help promote eBird on the state listserv, help new users come on board, and share checklists widely on joint outings. They also work to make sure the eBird filters and review process run smoothly in the state and that hotspots are accurately placed and sensible names. A long culture of county-listing in Maryland ensures that state birders spread far and wide and give the state relatively even coverage, not just as well-known "hotspots". In short, Maryland is exemplary in its eBird usage and Rob--our January 2011 eBirder of the month--sits right at the center of this Maryland corps of devoted eBirders. Congratulations Rob!

Name: Rob Ostrowski

Residence: Crofton, MD

Years eBirding: 6 years

Maryland eBird Life list: 325



Number of complete Maryland eBird Checklists: 2864*

Total eBird county ticks in Maryland: 3582

* - Not including the ones he entered on behalf of others!

From Rob:

Before I joined eBird in 2005, I had just begun to keep lists of the birds I observed in the field. Typically, I would try to note every bird I saw, but not necessarily the number of individuals, and never things like observation type or duration. However, when I started using eBird, my record keeping became a lot more methodical and thorough, and not surprisingly, I began to learn a lot more about birds.

The map and bar chart features have always been some of my favorite things to use in eBird. To me, it’s endlessly fun and educational to search for a species within a particular date range and geographic area and, in a matter of seconds, be shown a map or bar chart with all the observations that meet my search criteria. However, it didn’t take long for me to find that these features were pulling from an incomplete dataset. Were there really fewer than ten sightings of Sooty Shearwater off the coast of Maryland? Of course not, but that’s what it looked like in eBird!

To create a more complete picture of the state’s bird life, Maryland eBirders have been relentlessly collecting complete checklists. So much so that Maryland is regularly near the top of “Checklists Submitted for Current Month,” often with states that have much larger populations. Last year alone, we entered well over 25,000 checklists. Maryland benefits from having many dedicated eBirders who not only have a mind for entering their new data, but also their old data. This even includes checklists that had been collected by others.

One of the ways that I’ve contributed to this effort is by entering historical bird records collected by others. The primary problem with historical bird records isn’t their scarcity (because birders on the whole are great record keepers), but that they are scattered and often difficult to access. I’ve often thought that if we can get these old records into eBird, they will become readily available to millions of people, giving life to something which would otherwise only collect dust in basements or on hard drives. And by entering historical records, we are creating a baseline of data to which we can compare new data – an essential component to studying bird distribution.

One such project has involved entering data from approximately 170 Maryland pelagic trips dating all the way back to a 1946 trip attended by Roger Tory Peterson and Chandler Robbins!  Most of these checklists weren’t  eBird-ready in their original forms. In fact, they all lacked important details like start time, duration, and distance traveled. Furthermore, most checklists didn’t include common species, like Herring Gull or Common Tern, which were most certainly present. Finding this information for trips that took place, on average, 40 years ago has been a challenge, but by digging through old publications and by contacting birders who were on those trips and still have records, I’ve been able to enter many complete checklists into eBird.

More and more birders are entering their old personal records into eBird. Many local records committees have already entered their data. Some data, however, will simply never be entered without volunteers scouring the source material to bring it all together. It’s important that some of us take on projects to keep this valuable data from being lost. My other personal projects past and future include entering checklists from Jan Reese’s surveys of Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay (a dredge-spoil island created in the late 1990s that has become a mecca for shorebirds), reports collected in a database by Marshall Iliff and Jim Stasz for reports to the journal North American Birds database, and Harry Armistead’s exhaustive records from birding Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

There are plenty of challenges to any historical data entry project, but the rewards are just as great. Gradually features like the All-Time First / Last Records, Arrivals and Departures, and High Counts become more true to reality, and not just an “eBird reality.” But more importantly, for the first time in history, we are taking all of these old records (not just the unusual sightings) and putting them in a single place where they can be instantly accessed, learned from and enjoyed by researchers and birders around the world. Thanks eBird!

And thanks to Rob, from eBird!

As a final note, we should say that we fully support this and other efforts to capture historical data in eBird. Indeed, eBird provides a state of the art and publicly accessible repository for historical bird checklists which might otherwise be lost. But we also have some hope that enough of these data exist across the country that we may actually start to paint accurate pictures of the occurrence of some species from the decades the preceded the internet. Perhaps one day we will be able to use eBird to track the disappearance of Bewick's Wrens or Loggerhead Shrikes in the East, or even to watch the last sightings of Passenger Pigeon or Eskimo Curlew blink solemnly off the map. For more information on how to contribute to historical data entry projects, download 'Entering Historical Data in eBird' and please drop us a note at ebird@cornell.edu to let us know what you are up to.

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

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

Our goal with the eBirder of the Month is to highlight how an individual is using eBird to inspire others to follow in their footsteps. One does not need to be a well-traveled or expert birder to be featured. Anyone who uses eBird is eligible, provided she or he understands the overarching goals of eBird and is committed to using the program regularly and properly. We are particularly interested in featuring people who are participating in our eBird Site Survey or County Birding initiatives. If you know of a candidate for the next eBirder of the Month, please contact us. See all of our winners here.