Reporting Backtracking Distance on eBird
Distance within eBird should be the unique distance you covered while birding along a trail, road, or water body, whether by foot, bike, car, or any other means of moving across the landscape. If you submit a single checklist for an out-and-back birding event, only report the one-way distance. Shorter distance checklists are strongly preferred, ideally 1 kilometre or less, but do your best to keep it under 8 kilometres. eBird Mobile tracks make this easier than ever.
If you cover the same section of trail out-and-back, it is best to submit a checklist for the trip in and another for the trip out. This gives an insight into how detectable different species are under different conditions. However, if you submit a single checklist for an out-and-back birding event, you should only record the distance traveling in one direction but while recording the total time you spent traveling both out and back on the trail as long as it’s on one checklist. On the return trip, record only those birds you suspect are new.
One additional point: To collect the complete, accurate track of where you went birding – Please do not stop the track half way through in order to get the one-way distance. It is much better to let the track continue to run to record the full distance (including the doubling back) and then to cut your distance in half.
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- Here, a full circuit has been covered and reported distance is same as the distance covered
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- Here, overall distance walked is 0.76 km but the reported distance will be 0.38 km to account for backtracking
The new tracking versions of eBird Mobile are an accurate way to report your location. If you notice that the track made errors in terms of jumping around off of the route you walked, do your best to reduce the total distance to what you actually covered. If the track is really inaccurate, or if you accidentally hop in the car and drive 20 kilometres without realizing it, you have the option to delete the track and we recommend you do so in these cases.
One of the next developments will be the ability to edit a track to correct for mistakes where you leave the track running for too long—we all have done it!
You can view the track on your device before submission by tapping on the distance and elapsed time on the checklist page, or on the map icon on the Review & Submit page. For the moment, it is not possible to view tracks on your submitted checklists on ebird.org, but rest assured that they’re being stored in the database.