"I know we'll hear from its numerous and ever-vigilant official
defenders"

Hi Bill,
guess you must mean me ... about as close to 'official' as
ebird gets unless you expect to hear from Cornell. And
this would be the first time defending it, though I rather
see it as clarifying some misconceptions.


WHAN: "but I do want to point out some of the obvious limitations
of eBird for record-keeping purposes. No doubt a hundred years
from now it'll be much more informative, should more data
 accumulate.

A hundred years? I suggest taking a look at my SA within last winter's
North American Birds on the White-winged Crossbill irruption. Here
is the chart for that flight.

http://tinyurl.com/yghpvpb

select from the tab, count totals.

eBird, and only eBird, picked up on the
bi-modal flight ... charting the flight down to the cemetery. Questions
abound on the listserv for which ebird could shed some light ...
as I have occasionally illustrated. Or better yet, illustrated by
Ethan Kistler, as he augments his winter distribution maps with
eBird data. It really does have ramifications for in the near term.

WHAN: ...and--importantly--someone includes data from years past.
It'll always be much more informative about robins than it will be
about rarities, of course, and that's to be
 expected."

I take it you mean in the same way that the Christmas Bird Count, the
Breeding Bird Survey, and the Ohio Breeding Bird Atlas (which makes
use of eBird) are focused on the more mundane species by virtue of
counting everything. If so, yes, you are correct.

Although, I wonder what  the winter distribution of  say Gray Catbirds
be like if we had CBC party data pinpointed... sure we can plot them
by CBC circle, but would eBird reveal a more discrete pattern, one tied
to habitat, or micro-climate ... would riparian corridors be revealed as
key to survival, or buttonbush swamps for Rusty Blackbirds, or identify
discrete over-wintering sites for waterfowl, illustrate the value of
one estuary over another along Lake Erie for mergansers, map the
use of specific grassland plots by Short-eared Owls... well I hope you
get the picture. Bird conservation is more than just the what and how
many, it is also about the where ... and presently we have a very coarse
understanding of this for all but a few heavily studied species.

Presently, only eBird offers a means by which, in near real time,
one's field observation may be tied to a specific geographic
location. What if BBS participants plotted the 50 points of their
route and entered years of data for each one ... could they
discern a pattern as the environment changed from a wheat field
to a shopping mall? What if the DOZENS of of observers visiting
Conneaut Harbor chose to enter their shorebird sightings back
through the past 20 years. Imagine Craig Holt's data presented in
his fine article on the shorebirds of Conneaut magnified 10x,
or 20 x ... Craig  imagine what you could have done with that data.

RARITIES: Why cannot eBird serve to be informative about
rarities as well? Apart from their biology,  I have explained in
this forum how pinpointing a rarity in eBird ... possible down to a
few meters ... could assist those wishing to relocate that rarity. I
would not suggest a substitution for written directions, which are
filled with information like where to park, but certainly being able
print out a map has to count for something. Or target which
dock that rare gull was sitting on at the marina ... etc.

And to bring Allen Chartier into the discussion, I have to wonder
what it would be like to see a map of the 40+ Rufous Hummingbirds
in eBird (only about a dozen records there now). Surely Allen, you
would find that the frequency histogram of interest. You could
reviewing 20+ years of The Ohio Cardinal, and plot the appropriate
histograms in a spreadsheet. Doable, but rather tedious. And even
then, the geographic information may be no more specific than a
city or township.


Part 1 of 2

cheers

Vic Fazio
Shaker Heights, OH
State Reviewer, eBird, Ohio & Oklahoma
Regional Editor, North American Birds, OH-PA-WV
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