Birding News and Features
Welcome to Hispaniola eBird!
Hispaniola eBird is an initiative of the Hispaniola Ornithological Society, The Audubon Society of Haiti, The National Museum of Natural History, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and the National Aviary, in conjunction with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon. This is the regional eBird project for the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the birthplace of John James Audubon and home to a rich and amazing avifauna with 31 endemic bird species. Hispaniola eBird aims to satisfy a need to consolidate information on bird species distribution and occurrence.
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.
New directory finds almost half Caribbean IBAs lack protection
Of the 770 bird species occurring in the Caribbean, 148 are endemic, with 105 confined to single islands. But only around 10% of the region’s original habitat remains, and 54 of the Caribbean’s bird species are globally threatened, of which 12 are Critically Endangered.
BirdLife's newly-published Important Bird Areas of the Caribbean: key sites for conservation is a milestone for the BirdLife Caribbean Programme, which began in 2001. BirdLife International and its Partners, and a range of other organisations, have identified, documented and mapped 283 internationally significant Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in the Caribbean. IBAs are key sites for the conservation of birds and biodiversity, and the building blocks for conservation planning. They are identified nationally, using data gathered locally and applying internationally agreed criteria.
Effort-based Observations -- An eBird Thank You!
At eBird we strive to gather data from birders in a useful way, and then make these data available to science and conservation. eBird allows birders to select from four methodology choices, three of which have associated effort information, thereby greatly enhancing the utility of the data. Back in June we made a plea to eBird users for more observations with effort, in the hope of pushing more eBirders away from using "Casual Observations" and toward using the three effort-based protocols. We'd like to thank those of you that have graduated to effort-based birding, and here we'd like to share some of the recent good news concerning the decrease in overall use of "Casual Observations" as a birder's "default" methodology.
Field Guide to the Birds of Hispaniola
Birds of the Dominican Republic and Haiti is now available! This is the first comprehensive and fully-illustrated guide to cover the birds of this biologically rich island. There are detailed accounts and color plates for more than 300 species, including thirty-one endemic species. the book is available in English, French and Spanish.
