Submit Your Bird Sightings to eBird

Mr. T. Hawk, a red-shouldered hawk, lives in a tree on our block. After a winter of quiet contemplation he is feeling his cheerios and when working in the office in the morning I can often hear his yelling as he goes after his squirrel/mouse/rabbit breakfast. I'm going to watch him a little more closely this spring so I can report sightings of him (and all the turkey buzzards around here) to eBird, at http://ebird.org.

eBird is a project of Audubon and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. You can browse the bird information that's already been submitted here, or you can register and submit bird information yourself. Registration starts off simple -- user name and password -- but then gets into asking your address and phone number (phone # is optional) and then has a third screen of optional demographic-type questions.

Once you're registered you can choose Submit Observations to register a sighting. You'll be taken through four panels of questions, the first to determine and specify where you saw the bird, the second to specify what kind of observation it was (casual, stationary count, traveling count, or exhaustive area count) and some details (date, duration, time, area covered -- how much of this is required depends on what kind of observation it was). After that you'll be asked to specify the species of what you saw and when. A menu of species are provided divided up by type (loons, owls, diurnal raptors, etc.). Finally, you'll be asked to confirm the information and then provide any additional information you see fit.

Don't care about submitting bird information? All right. You also have the option of just exploring the data that's already been submitted. Click on "View and Explore Data". Here you can look for birds by species, by location, or get an overview of all the bird data submitted to eBird.

I decided I wanted to view birds in Asheville, North Carolina. Accordingly I chose to view by location, picked "Counties in this State", and then picked North Carolina/Ashe County. And I got a table that shows a series of bird species and the span of one year, with green marks to indicate species-spottings and frequency. It is very tough to read. The spottings are in green. The "insufficient data" bars are in gray. The green barely sticks out. I found myself squinting a lot. You can also download the data into a file that can be opened in Excel, which I would do just so I could read it better.

There's a lot more to do on this site as well. If you're registered you have a "My eBird" that you can use to make maps and graphs of your data, as well as summarize your lists and observations. There's also a Google Group devoted to eBird. Worth a look if you have any interest at all in birds.

Posted to Science-Ornithology | TrackBack