eBird Rare Bird Alerts are here!
With the new eBird Rare Bird Alerts, you'll get hourly information sent to your inbox on rare birds in your region of interest. White-winged Crossbill, Klamath Falls, OR, February. Photograph by Brian Sullivan.
How it works
The Rare Bird Alert works in conjunction with the regional eBird checklist filters. Every time a record is entered in eBird, the location and date of the sighting is run against a matrix of expected maximum counts for each species in the area. If the number of birds in the sighting exceeds those expected counts, you receive the eBird confirmation message (always a sign that you have found a good bird!), asking you to confirm your entry. These records are then confirmed by our expert reviewers, and these steps are critical to our data quality process. But these checklist filters also define what constitutes a "rare bird" in a region by highlighting any species (or subspecies) with a count limit set to zero, and those are the reports featured in the Rare Bird Alerts.
These Alerts include not only out-of-range birds, but also unseasonal sightings. So a Curve-billed Thrasher showing up in Vermont obviously would be considered a rarity, but so would a January report of Red-eyed Vireo from the same area.
As with other alerts, rarity records that have not been reviewed by an eBird editor are labeled as "UNCONFIRMED". Once records have been reviewed and approved, they are labeled as "CONFIRMED".
How to sign up
It is now possible to use alerts for countries (outside of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico), states, and counties (just type in the name of the region you want). To sign up just go to "Explore Data" and click on "Alerts". At the bottom of the page, type in your region of interest into the Rare Bird Alert search window.
Please note that each user is limited to 25 alerts, but that you can subscribe and unsubscribe as many times as you want. If you are going on a trip, you may want to sign up for Alerts for the states/counties you will be visiting. Once you get home, you may want to unsubscribe.
These alerts will include photographs when the observer has embedded photos. At the very least, we encourage observers to add comments for rare and unusual species. Detailed comments not only help our editors to quickly review records, but also can be useful to other birders if you describe exactly where you saw a bird, give tips on how to relocate it, what plumage it was in, and other specifics.
eBird Checklist Filters
Please be aware that our Rare Bird Alerts rely on the quality of the checklist filter running behind it. Although eBird is a global project, these checklist filters are still pretty coarse in many areas outside North America, and these coarse filters could miss some reports of rarities. The United States, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Chile, and Colombia, as well as the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, and scattered other countries and regions have refined, detailed filters. But for many other countries the filters are in need of refinement from experts, including most of Africa and Asia, parts of Europe, and even some areas in the New World (Brazil, Argentina, and a few others). If you are willing to help develop filters in these parts of the world, we would welcome your help (please get in touch at ebird@cornell.edu.). Also, if you think a bird should show up on the Rare Bird Alert and it isn't, drop us a line so we can modify the filter accordingly.
Happy Holidays from Team eBird and everyone at Cornell Lab of Ornithology!
Team eBird (Marshall, Brian, and Chris)
