Curiosity piques by Vic Fazio's request, I went to eBird and looked at what
has been reported in the spring migration season for the period 2003-2007
for Great Egret, to see what the current data looks like. Interestingly, the
histograms of the data show that there is a large spike in observations for
all the categories around May 8th, with the exception of birds per hour,
which has a large spike around the first of April. I immediately associated
the date of May 8th as being about the time that large numbers of birders
head to the Lake Erie marshes in search of warblers, and of course they
would be seeing Great Egrets as well. I have to wonder if the spike in the
histograms at May 8th is accurately reflecting when the most Great Egrets
are present, or if it's an artifact of when most birders are active. Looking
at a map of sightings, it seems that there hasn't been enough data entered
to figure out if there are corridors or not - the clusters of sightings away
from the lake are near cities, which again introduces the bias of reporting
where the most birders are, not where the most birds are present.
I generally enter all my birding lists into eBird, so I will be adding some
data to this interesting project. I'm going to follow it on eBird as well.
It's not that hard to get pretty accurate locations in eBird as well, with
the new Google maps feature that lets you put a location on a map or aerial
photo. So if you're traveling along a highway and you see some Great Egrets,
you can just pay attention to the mile marker or other landmarks, and it's a
simple matter to find that location using the mapping tool.
Andrew R. Sewell, MS, RPA
Principal Investigator
Historical/Industrial Archaeology
Hardlines Design Company
4608 Indianola Avenue
Columbus, Ohio 43214
ph. (614)-784-8733
fax (614)-784-9336
________________________________
This mailbox protected from junk email by MailFrontier Desktop
from MailFrontier, Inc. http://info.mailfrontier.com
______________________________________________________________________
Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society.
Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list.
Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/.
You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS
Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]
|
