Did your owling get recorded as nocturnal hours?
As we’ve been reviewing checklists submitted this Atlas season, we’ve noticed three common data-entry errors that can negatively affect project results. Please read through this article and check your data to make sure WBBA II is as accurate as possible!
1. Don’t forget the breeding code when a species is flagged!
This is a simple one we’ve noticed a lot of atlasers fall victim to. You’re going along, entering species and breeding codes, and then you need to add a rare species. You add comments describing the sighting so the record can be easily vetted by volunteer eBird reviewers. But then it’s very easy to forget to add the breeding code! This results in some of our best finds not making it into the Atlas system! Please check some of your best finds this year that were flagged as rare to make sure that you remembered to put down a breeding code, if one applies.
2. Submit night effort as a separate checklist.
You may have noticed that eBird keeps track separately of night hours tallied for a block. Every block requires some nighttime birding effort to survey birds like owls, nightjars, and rails and be considered complete. Important: The system marks the entire checklist either as night effort or as day effort based on the start time. If you started at 3 AM and birded for 10 hours, it would call those 10 hours of night effort because the start time is at night. The solution to this is simple: if you birded through dusk or dawn, break it into two checklists. The cutoff for a nocturnal checklist in eBird is 40 minutes before sunrise and 20 minutes after sunset. You can look up your local sunrise and sunset for any date here.
In reality, depending upon the area you covered, you’d probably want to split a 10-hour checklist into more than two segments anyway, but the graphic above serves to illustrate where the breaking point is.
3. Watch out for block lines, especially when using hotspots!
One of the biggest differences between entering Atlas eBird checklists and regular eBirding is that when atlasing, you have to be careful that your observations fall into the correct block. Block lines are pesky things and we’ve often been irritated to find that they fall in inconvenient ways, such as our poor Atlas Science Coordinator Ryan Brady, whose very yard is cut by a block.
The easiest way to make sure you are aware of block lines is to always use the “Find it on a Map” option when entering data into Atlas eBird. This will ensure that a map will pop up with the block lines and your eBird locations on it.
What you have to be VERY CAREFUL about is when you are using an existing hotspot in eBird. A hotspot is a predefined location for a popular birding spot. The hotspots have been in the system long before the Atlas came along and in many cases, an existing eBird hotspot crosses one or more block lines. If you birded in an area where a hotspot encompasses multiple blocks, you may need to add one or more personal locations to make sure that you are entering your birds into the block where you saw them. This is more important than putting all the data into the pre-existing hotspot.
Let’s take a look at a couple examples where an existing eBird Hotspot crosses block lines:
Horicon Marsh Auto Tour
UW-Madison Arboretum
Is nothing sacred? Even Lambeau Field falls into 4 blocks!
The bottom line is, even when birding locations that are very familiar to you, don’t forget to check where the block lines fall, and you may need to enter an additional eBird location or two to use with your Atlas checklists as appropriate.
Ideally, if you know where you plan to be birding, it’s helpful to take a peek at the block boundaries before you head out into the field so you can keep separate lists. In addition to having the block lines viewable on Atlas eBird, you can view and print maps of the blocks by using our interactive, static, or advanced maps you can find on the Atlas website.
Thanks again for a great first season!