Please join us in congratulating Shawn Langston of St. George, Utah, the winner of the January eBirder of the Month Challenge, sponsored by Carl Zeiss Sports Optic. Shawn submitted a total of 47 checklists in January, all from southwestern Utah and nearby areas Arizona and Nevada. Here is the winning checklist, which was drawn at random. Shawn will receive a new ZEISS Conquest HD 8×42 binocular and a selection of books from Princeton University Press. When we notified him, he wrote back “Are you kidding me!! I remember reading about this on the eBird website but thought my probability of winning would be about zero.”
Shawn also writes, “I’ve been a birder for about 14 years and an eBird user for about 2 ½. I currently work for the Bureau of Land Management-Arizona Strip Field Office as a wildlife biologist. I’ve also worked for several years as a wildlife technician for the US Forest Service, mostly conducting bird-related surveys. Among other things, I’m tasked with inventorying and monitoring several species of migratory and special-status birds. I enjoy working on the Arizona Strip because I’m often in very remote areas that have rarely seen any documented birding activity so I feel like I’m making a small but real contribution to our knowledge of bird distribution. eBird is a great tool for not only keeping track of my field observations and surveys but for sharing that information with the public as well. I also like the option of downloading my checklists as csv files and then exporting them into GIS programs like Arcmap.
Of course, I also do a lot of birding on my own time and try to submit checklists for most of it. The checklist that was chosen as the winner was from a quick stop I made while riding my bike home from work on the path that runs along the Virgin River here in St. George, UT. A shrike caught my eye and I stopped to see if it was possibly a northern (which would have been a state bird for me–it turned out to be a Loggerhead). After scanning through a flock of flying Canada geese for something more uncommon and taking note of the few other birds around, I headed home. Before I started using eBird I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about this kind of brief, semi-random kind of observation. Now I do and so do thousands of others. And it’s all accessible to anyone, which is pretty awesome I think!
Thank you all for all the hard work you do with eBird. Both as a birder and as someone who works in the land management field, it’s truly awesome!”
We would like to point out that although Shawn’s winning checklist was of short duration and did not report a lot of species, that it is an ideal eBird submission. Shawn’s checklist is reporting all species and uses one of our effort-based protocols–in this case a Traveling Count. In addition, Shawn took the time to provide counts for all species, which is always welcome. Repeated short counts are very valuable for eBird. You do not need to spend hours and hours at a birding hotspot to submit valuable data to eBird. Short checklists from your yard or nearby areas that are poorly covered are just as valuable and welcome. Thanks to Shawn for setting such a great example with his use of eBird.
Congratulations!