eBird and the new world of birding
The world of birding has changed greatly since 1996. Access to the internet, especially via cellular phones, has been a key driver of change. In the past, reports of a rare bird sighting might appear months later in the pages of American Birds or the Illinois Seasonal Reports prepared by Vernon Kleen, former ornithologist at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources in Springfield. Later, they appeared in Illinois Birds and Birding, subsequently re-named Meadowlark. Obviously, hearing about a rarity in that manner meant one had no chance to see it unless you regularly phoned in to hear the recorded messages on Rare Bird Alerts. Even then, those recorded messages were normally updated weekly. The most effective strategy was to be friends with all the birders who were likely to find something interesting and exchange calls regularly for updates.
Today, if you discover a rarity and do not immediately text your friends then post an email to the relevant birding e-mail listserve, you might be ostracized from the birding community. Our patience for delays has completely disappeared. As a consequence, birding is even more of a team game. That has its advantages and disadvantages.
On the one hand, rarities are much more likely to be seen by multiple observers; always a useful outcome. It probably also has generated revenue for the Illinois State Police thanks to higher numbers of speeding tickets given to birders zooming across the state in response to a text message. That means, for birders who enjoy tracking such things, their lists of birds detected by year, county and state, and several combinations thereof, can grow larger than at any time in the era before cell phones. More eyes find more birds and technology promotes sharing.
On the other hand, rarities are notorious for being on the move and hard to re-locate, depending on the site, the species, and the weather. It can be maddening to rush out the door on the hunt for a rarity only to spend hours, or a whole day, coming up empty. If you had learned about that rarity months afterward, the sense of frustration would not quite be the same. Still disappointing, but not as intense as the feeling you get when “the bird was JUST HERE!”
The greatest benefit of technological advances in aid of birding has been the development and current widespread use of eBird (eBird.org). Built by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, eBird has revolutionized our ability to share our sightings with anyone, map bird occurrences across the world, and track our own sightings, including lists of species detected by year, county, state, country and more. eBird is reasonably easy to use by entering observations on your computer connected to the internet or via the eBird app on smartphones and tablets. Launched in 2002, eBird really gained traction around 2010 when tools for helping birders see their (and others’) lists were implemented.
Although the listing game certainly does motivate use of eBird, the greater utility of eBird is that it tries to motivate birders to enter data from counts of all birds encountered while birding. Birding used to be mostly about finding the “good stuff:” the rarities, the early spring arrivals, late fall departures, or high counts; much of what is reported in this book, actually. eBird is transforming how birders bird. By encouraging us to count all birds of all species, tracking our effort we invest, and reporting the locations where we counted birds, all kinds of studies can be done that will help conserve birds and their habitats and will help us understand how birds move around the planet. Instead of books like this one selecting less than 0.001% of all records to publish, eBird has the potential to allow us to see ALL the records of a species at once.
Because eBird is such a wonderful resource and tool, and because it is probably not going away any time soon, it is useful to discuss best practices for contributing bird observations to eBird. Southern Illinois is such a rich place for birds, yet it has always had comparatively few birders, and the amount of useful bird data has been even lower. We have enough information about the “good stuff” to characterize migration periods, understand what typical daily high counts for a species ought to be at each season, and build a pretty complete species list for the region, but we have insufficient count data to help future birders and researchers understand how abundances and distributions are changing through time. eBird is becoming a key resource for those who wish to conserve birds and their habitats. By following best practices while you are birding, you help produce important outcomes for making birds’ lives better.
eBird is based on creating checklists, which are lists of species and their numbers detected during a particular outing. Ideally, those lists include a count of each species (not just an X indicating the species was detected), at least one measurement of how much effort was expended, and precise information about where the counting was done. Here are some tips indicating what makes a useful checklist. I encourage you to follow all these recommendations. They are simple. They increase the usefulness of your birding knowledge immensely. Remember that there have always been very few birders in Southern Illinois, so why not increase the value of your contributions by adopting these simple methods?
Here is a list of the key best practices. I first list them, then I provide additional comments on each one.
1. Do stationary counts most of the time.
2. Track your effort accurately by noting your start time and end time for each checklist.
3. Count all species you detect and avoid the use of “X,” which is noting a species is present without counting the number of individuals.
4. Correctly indicate the type of count (stationary [please!], traveling, area or incidental).
5. Correctly answer the question of whether you have reported all species you were able to identify or not.
6. If you find something rare, write a description of the field marks used to identify the bird and add a photo or voice recording if you can get one.
That’s it! So easy to follow these recommendations, right? Let’s take a further look at each one.
Do stationary counts whenever possible. Stationary counts involve being in one place the whole time, not moving more than a few yards. For example, sitting in a bird blind at the refuge and identifying and counting all the birds you see is a stationary count. Stopping at a flooded field because you see shorebirds, counting birds in your backyard, pausing for 3 to 5 min every so often along a hike, those are all stationary counts. An easy way to note your location during stationary counts is to use a handheld GPS unit (the one I use daily costs less than $100) or a GPS app for your phone (some are free, but better ones cost less than $10). Set your GPS to provide location in decimal degrees, which is what eBird and Google Maps prefer. Then, when you start a count, just note the latitude and longitude, the start time of your count, and identify and count birds. When you are ready to leave, note your end time. It is so easy! When you get to your computer, just enter the latitude and longitude into eBird and eBird maps your location automatically for you, putting it in the right county, adding your data to the right places, and saving you a ton of time navigating around maps trying to figure out where you were. How could it be any easier?
Traveling counts are those done while you are moving more than a few yards. For example, you might be visiting the driving route through your local refuge and just want to create a single checklist for that one route. Although the method can be useful and convenient, it has some serious shortcomings. First, most of us are terrible at guessing how far we have traveled. The distance traveled is an important part of the effort measured when counting birds. More effort means more species and more birds. So if you guess wrong on the distance, you muddy the relationship between effort and the birds reported. If you choose to do traveling lists, consider getting a GPS unit or a GPS app for your smartphone and using it to track your distance. The newest version of the eBird app will also track your movements and calculate distance for you.
Another major drawback of doing traveling counts is that we might know how far you traveled, but we do not know your exact route unless you use the eBird app with tracking turned on. If anyone wants to link your bird data with habitat data, they will have a very hard time. We do not know if you turned left, right, up or down at each intersection. Except for studies of birds at the coarsest scales (areas of thousands of acres), traveling counts do not allow researchers to link your observations with habitat data because of too much uncertainty about where you might have seen birds. Stationary counts save us from that severe shortcoming.
Stationary counts are more valuable than other types of counts for several reasons. First, it is much easier to track effort by simply noting the start and end time of your bird counting. So much easier than trying to recall what your starting mileage was or guessing how far you walked, rode your bike, or jet-packed. Second, and most importantly, we can know exactly where you were. That means a couple of things. Anyone can come along and exactly repeat your bird count. They can stand in the same place, start at the same time, end at the same time, and do this next year, in 20 years, in 500 years. If you use any other kind of count, your contribution cannot be repeated exactly. Think about the value of that for a moment. Someone could return to your favorite place centuries later and compare with your birding contribution. That’s powerful. Probably the birds will be different then. Some of the same species, some new ones. Counts may be quite different. Why? They won’t know very precisely if you do a traveling count. But if you do a stationary count and note your exact location, we can get the habitat data around that point. Google is watching our world change. Various natural resource agencies are, too. Those habitat images are being permanently archived. If we know exactly where you counted birds, we can measure the habitat characteristics at the point where those birds you encountered were present. Any changes in numbers and species of birds can then be associated directly with how the habitat changed. That’s powerful, too!
The primary argument people make for not doing stationary counts is that they hate data entry. They just want to enter one checklist each day they go birding. A typical birding day involves many stops, which means many checklists. Understood. We have ways to make this process easier. Here are some suggestions.
1. Get the eBird app for your smartphone. Create a new personal location each time you start a new checklist. When choosing this option, your phone locates where you are each time (view the map to make sure you agree with your phone). For most phones, your location will be within a few yards of where you are, which is great accuracy for a useful stationary count. Some people want to use the option to Choose the Nearest Hotspot. Trouble is, you are almost never at the same location where the Hotspot pin is located in eBird. By choosing that option, you have already generated a location error. Use personal locations. Some people will argue that they want to see their names in the Hotspot lists. That’s fine. Know that in due time eBird will move from a point-based location system to a polygon-based system for identifying Hotspot locations. In other words, all your personal locations noted at precisely where you were birding, will be gathered up and compiled into lists for the relevant Hotspot area you were visiting. You will still be famous.
2. If you really, really, really do not want to enter multiple checklists into eBird because you were unable to convince yourself to change your bad habits for the good of helping birds live long and prosper, find a compromise. Perhaps, for example, you could do your usual traveling counts but stop once every half-hour and do a 5-min stationary count, just to make yourself feel like you are actually using your birding powers for good. Why not?
3. If you are willing to admit that you are just going to be one of the people who uses eBird as free listing software and all you care about is the Top 100, then make all of your checklists Incidental Lists and say “No” you are not reporting all species you encountered.
Track your effort properly. When we spend more time or cover more distance or area while birding, we encounter more birds. So it becomes important to know some measure of effort. The easiest way to document effort is to correctly track the start and end times in each checklist you make. If you do stationary counts, that is all you really need to do. You can also estimate the area around the point to provide another measure of effort. For example, the average distance most people hear birds around a forest point is 100 meters, which would mean each stationary count in forest is surveying approximately 3 hectares. At more open vantage points, such as lake fronts, you may be seeing birds with your scope across an area of 100, 200 or more hectares. For traveling counts, you need to note start and end times plus distance moved. This can be done with the eBird app, GPS app, a GPS unit, or back at your computer on a mapping site later. The easiest solution is to use the eBird app.
Try your best to count all the birds you detect, not to just tick them off as being present. This includes birds some people do not like, such as blackbirds, House Sparrows and European Starlings. All birds are worth counting. Remember, often the only data we have on some of these birds come from birders. People say counting is hard. It need not be all that time consuming. See a big group of waterfowl? Count ten. Then county fifty. See what fifty looks like through your scope. Then pan slowly across the group and count how many groups of 50 you find. That’s your number. That number is way more useful, even though you know it is probably a bit wrong, than an X. I also encourage people to think about what they are doing when birding. They are looking at or listening to each bird to identify it to species. That’s how you name each bird you see or hear. If you are taking that moment to identify it, why not also tally up the number? You are already interacting with each bird anyway.
Be sure to correctly indicate the type of count you are doing, stationary, traveling, incidental, or others. The most common mistake made is to call a count Incidental when it is not. Incidental counts in eBird are those data gathered while you are doing something other than birding, yet you detect a bird you find interesting and want to record in eBird. Driving to work, gardening, walking the runway modeling the latest lingerie, wondering why the Bears can never find a quality quarterback. Important stuff, but not birding. If you enter an Incidental checklist, make sure you correctly indicate that you are NOT including all birds that were present at the time.
Last, if you find a rare bird, be sure to write a description of the field marks in the species comments section and load a photo or voice recording if you can get one. Call other people so you can get multiple observers of the bird. Like anything unusual, the more eyes on it the better. For the sake of the historical record, birds photographed and seen by multiple observers are likely to be valued much more highly than single-observer records lacking any hard evidence. If you can only provide written information, focus on describing the bird. Writing in the comments that you are very familiar with the species or that the bird was known to be at the location or that you were so excited because it was a lifer is not enough. Provide details about the fieldmarks seen. A novel is unnecessary, but a few sentences actually describing the bird will help greatly.
It really is not hard to provide useful information about your birding with eBird. You actually learned how to be a great eBirder when you were in kindergarten, of all places, without realizing it. We were all told stationary counts are better than traveling counts whenever we are looking and listening for birds. Remember that message? Stop, Look, and Listen!