Birding News and Features

Fill in the gaps--bird the road less traveled this January!

eBirders often email us and ask where they should go birding to make the biggest impact in regions with little data. It's perhaps little surprise that eBird checklist submissions are most dense in areas with large human populations, so getting away from those areas is a good first step for filling in the data gaps in eBird. But seeing these gaps can be really astonishing, and with the help of map wizard Paul Hurtado, we've come up with a neat way to visualize eBird data density at the county level. These maps are a visualization of the total number of eBird checklists submitted in each US county in the month of January across all years. Pull up your state map and see how your home county is faring. And better yet, find a county that's white, pink, or yellow, and go do as many eBird checklists as you can there this January!

eBirder of the Month: Zachary DeBruine

eBird paper published in PLoS Biology

Thanks eBirders! You've done it again. Your active participation in eBird allowed us to publish a paper that highlights how eBird engages the birding community in science and conservation in one of the leading scientific journals in the world, PLoS Biology. We hope that this publication shows the ways that you (the eBird community) shape our thinking about eBird, and also demonstrates how your observations are being used by scientists and the conservation community. Because PLoS Biology is an open access journal, we encourage you to share this link and content with anyone interested in reading, reproducing, or distributing it. Feel free to translate it, post it to listservs, or put it to use in any other way. We hope you view the article here. 

eBird Rare Bird Alerts are here!

After releasing Year Alerts last week, we are happy to announce another exciting Alert option -- the eBird Rare Bird Alert. This alert basically takes the eBird Notable Birds Google Gadget and moves it into an eBird Alert environment, meaning that you can now receive hourly or daily email summaries, or just go view rare birds on the web at our eBird alerts page. One key update is the addition of counties to the available alert regions, meaning you can customize your rare bird alert experience more than ever. The new Rare Bird Alert notifies you about any unusual bird that has been reported in your region of interest, and provides a link to the location and to the checklist so you can get more information about the sighting, and make the critical call as to whether it's worth calling in sick to work!

eBirding your Christmas Bird Counts

December 14 will begin the 112th Christmas Bird Count (CBC) season, and the first big weekend of counts will be 17-18 December. The Christmas Count is the largest and longest-running ornithological citizen science project. Its data are a great complement to what we are collecting in eBird, and indeed the CBC has paved the way for eBird in many respects. It is not a problem to enter data in eBird and then submit it for the CBC too, since the two projects are collecting data in similar ways, but at different scales. eBird can be a great way to store your sector-level data and compare it from year to year.