Poor Weather Musings - eBird

The weather still fails to co-operate during hours that I can get out, so I have been catching up on eBird.

I was introduced to eBird last year, and immediately noticed that it has managed to accomplish something that few other outlets have - it gives the birding community something in return for sightings submitted to the research community. It does this by providing users access to sightings of note, providing alerts to "needed birds" in various areas, and by giving us listers a great platform to keep track of our lists, going so far as to break sightings down to the month and county levels. It allows users to view seasonal abundance bar charts for large or small areas, all sightings of a given species, recent sightings of a given species, and much more! eBird also has worldwide coverage, so I have been able to submit sightings from my two overseas birding adventures in South Korea and Costa Rica!

For those of us in British Columbia, eBird is also the closest thing that we have to a Provincial Bird Records Committee, in the form of Dick Cannings, our provincial co-ordinator. Dick spends countless hours of his own time reviewing sightings, maintaining hotspots, and following up on submissions, things that very rarely get noticed until a request for more information arrives in the old inbox, at which point it is usually greeted by grumbles. Without his dedication, we would not have the infrastructure and information we have access to, and for that we owe him a debt of gratitude.

For those of you who don't currently use eBird, I highly recommend it. With a little practice, data entry is a breeze, and it provides a great way to keep track of your own sightings and notes. There is also a great lack of historical information (at least in B.C.), so my recommendation goes doubly for those who are sitting on decades of notebooks. Many species that appear on the Victoria Checklist don't appear in eBird because no one has bothered to input them (recent additions of old birds include American Avocet and Clark's Grebe).

This site, created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has the potential to change birding technology substantially, but it does depend on a steady stream of inputs from us, the birding community at large. I know we all have a lot of other things that we could be doing instead of inputting data online, but this site really does make it simple, and takes up very little of said precious time.

Anyway, enough of my soapbox sermon, give it a look-see!

Back to hoping for good weather and early migrants!