Vermont

The Vermont Bird Records Committee (VBRC) is pleased to announce a new online form with media uploading for reporting observations of rare, out-of-season, and rare nesting bird species in the state. The tool was created for the committee by the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.

Founded in 1980, the mission of the VBRC is to validate records of birds within the State of Vermont and maintain the state bird checklist. The committee is composed of expert birders and ornithologists from Vermont.

This new online form has been prepared to encourage full and detailed documentation of rare or unseasonal birds observed in Vermont. Please use this online form only. We do not accept paper or emailed forms. These reports represent a permanent record of the observation and should be as detailed as possible. New reports are reviewed annually by the VBRC, which evaluates records for their acceptability to future researchers and for inclusion in the official Vermont State Bird List.

Bird records typically originate as written descriptions and/or photographs, recordings, or video that are submitted by observers involved with the discovery of a rare bird, rare nesting species, or out-of-season reports. The committee actively solicits reports of any species on the review list as well as any species not currently on the official Vermont Bird Checklist. Each year the committee publishes an annual report detailing the decisions on all species reviewed during that year. The Committee meets annually in November.

You can consult the official Vermont Bird Checklist to determine which species require Rare Species Documentation, Rare Nesting Documentation, or Out of Season Report, as well as our list of subspecies that require reports.

Please consider entering all of your bird sightings, rare or common, on Vermont eBird, a project of the Vermont Atlas of Life. All accepted records reviewed by VBRC, if not added by the observer(s), are shared in Vermont eBird and are fully searchable there.

Thank you for helping us to document Vermont’s birds.

Kent McFarland
VBRC co-chair and Vermont eBird portal manager