eBirder of the month - Kent McFarland

Name: Kent McFarland (aka Kaptain Krummholz)

Residence: Woodstock, Vermont

Years eBirding: 9

eBird Life List: 735

Number of eBird Locations: 661

Number of eBird Checklists: 1,690 personal and several thousand historic

It is hard to believe it has been nearly a decade since I entered my first eBird checklist on November 20, 2002 - a morning of watching the feeders in our yard. Like many bird watchers, I was primed for eBird. Since I began seriously watching birds back in 1989, I’d been keeping checklists and counts in my field notebooks of nearly every bird I had seen. Before eBird, I wasn’t sure why, it just seemed like it might be important some day. When eBird arrived, I was ready.

I wasn’t a birder by age 8 like some of the great birders I know. Rather, I worked my way towards birding. I grew up fishing miles of streams and hunting acres of woods with my Dad, first in Oregon and later in northwest Pennsylvania. I spent countless hours in the summer exploring bays and coves on Lake Nipissing in Ontario at my grandparents’ cottage. The place I was always the happiest was outside exploring nature.

In the Peace Corps I found myself surrounded by an amazing array of birds in Paraguay. Beatrix Treiterer, a fellow volunteer and now a USFWS biologist, was an avid birder and soon I was hooked. After just a few months I bought myself a cheap pair of binoculars and a bird guide in Spanish and became a fanatic. Today, I guess I am a birder, bird watcher, naturalist, ornithologist, conservation biologist, writer, photographer… whatever hat that fits for the moment... thanks to great people and great institutions that I have been lucky to have been around. 

Beginning in 1974, Vermont’s important bird observation data was collected through a project called Records of Vermont Birds that was sponsored by the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. For almost 30 years, birders dutifully summarized their seasonal bird sightings and submitted them.  With the help of a corps of dedicated volunteers, we assembled each seasonal report into a statewide summary that was printed and mailed to birders. Birders’ individual summaries were filed in boxes to be archived for the historical record.  The data undoubtedly hold many conservation and scientific discoveries, but the lack of a computer database for retrieval of these data had proven to be a roadblock to examining them.

I remember chatting with Ken Rosenberg about eBird at a Partners in Flight meeting we were attending and we got very excited about the idea of starting a state based portal to better serve birders locally. I soon secured a grant from the William P. Wharton Trust to help us get it off the ground and within months we had Vermont eBird, the first state portal to the database. I quickly began promoting the idea around the state and as eBird improved as a tool, it was easy to get birders hooked.

I also recruited volunteers to begin the huge task of entering over 30 years of Records of Vermont Bird data into eBird. With the help of a great group of volunteers pounding on keyboards, we have entered over 21,900 checklists representing every bird species ever recorded in Vermont! 

We still have a long, long way to go to enter all this data into eBird, but I have a dream of being able to analyze all of it together for things like changes in arrival and departure dates in regards to potential climate change, effects of shorter term weather patterns like cold winters or wet summers, changes in land use patterns and birds, and many other questions. Imagine if we had eBird 100 years ago. What would the data be telling us now? What could we have prevented or better conserved if we were armed with information? Now, fast-forward perhaps just 25 years from now. At the rate we are going we will have over 5 million bird records scattered across Vermont alone! 

Recently, to promote Vermont eBird and birding in general, we started some local birding quests in Vermont. Two years ago a few of us attempted to find over a certain number of birds in our local county. Last year we had a “big year” contest for the town of Norwich using eBird. This year, we have the Vermont County Bird Quest (see http://www.vtecostudies.org/quest/), a big year for each county. Each county has a team of captains and a local sponsor, such as a bird club. There are prizes for each county thanks to sponsors like Birds and Beans Coffee, Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. The county with the highest overall species list, after adjusted for handicap to make all the counties comparable, will get to keep the county cup for the year at the sponsors location until the next team wins. From just an idea among a few, this contest has gone viral throughout the Vermont birding community. Many have now joined eBird and renewed their commitments to enter bird sightings, eBirding is spreading like spring redwings throughout Vermont. Maybe someday eBird will have a state or even a country competition!

The stage is set for us to learn great things and help conserve birds and their habitats that we all love, while at the same time having fun. I hope you all get outside and enjoy eBirding!