eB
I would like very much to re-iterate the remarks made by Bill Whan.
eBird has its uses, but a historical compendium of the birds of Ohio
is not one of them, nor do I see it serving as such any time in the future.
I further strongly urge that any birder truly interested in understanding
the abundance and distribution of the birds of Ohio have a working
knowledge of Bruce Peterjohn's Birds of Ohio. As I write this,
I have both 1st and 2nd editions within arm's length. You should too.
I also hope that every Ohio birder has handy, ideally in the car on any
given trip, McCormac and Kennedy's Birds of Ohio. A bit more illustrative to the
points of seasonality and range within Ohio, it is also a little more
up to date than Bruce's work. If you have a record flagged by eBird, there
is an excellent chance that looking it up within Jim's book will find it
out of the typical range and/or season illustrated therein.
As to the utility of the eBird database, wholesale adoption of eBird by
Ohio birders can be traced
back only to 2007. There is a reasonably good representation of the
status of birds across the state from that point on. Slowly, painfully,
we are adding vetted historical data.
1. 90% of that presently in the system prior to 1970 is sourced from
well known published material.
2. ... and those sources are fully cited with each eBird entry.
In the future, I hope bringing up such a record permits access to the
literature citation if not the published source itself.
There is a sense on my part,
(based on vetting 130,000 records) that back to around 1996-97 there
is sufficient data to reconstruct a fair representation of the seasonality
of the more common species.
see ...http://tinyurl.com/y2o8jfa
But that's as far as it goes. Again, if I may drive home the point, eBird
is simply a tool, one that augments/enhances our existing collection
and archive of bird observations ... how well or poorly it performs is up
to those who use it.
cheers
Vic Fazio
Horse Hollow Wind Farm, Buffalo Gap, TX
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