I struggled to stand steady in the gale. One hand, unbidden, went to my 
neck for the little old leather bag I always carry there on a lanyard. 
Inside, for luck, is the smooth grey gizzard-stone of a Great Auk, a 
gift to my great-grandfather from fellow Irishman Sir Ernest Shackleton, 
whom he had taught to ski after they had gone up to Dulwich College.  As 
the squall advanced over the lake’s tossing waves, I repositioned my 
hand to shield from snow the beacon on my experimental eBird Binocular; 
it would not do to have a scrambled signal on this occasion.  I tried to 
keep the distant black-and-white dot in the field of view in the gusty 
wind.  No problem: this instrument, still in development, is capable of 
automatically finding and instantly identifying rare birds in any field 
of view while sending a confirmatory image and coordinates to eBird 
Central.  It also has filters which will count, then erase from the 
field of view, all local commoner species, for example in Ohio reducing 
one’s view of a huge flock mostly of ring-billed and herring gulls to 
any mew or Heermann’s gulls, etc., that might be present. Already a 
readout was visible on the viewfinder---PAAU, Hawaiian for parakeet 
auklet--a first record for Ohio!  It was more than the frigid wind that 
made my hands tingle anew.  I reminded myself that soon arrays of 
microcameras with internet links will keep track of birds across the 
continent, all without requiring actual observers to head out into 
actual weather.  I hurried for a mug of warm grog in my e-car, where I 
skipped through the camera images and confirmed records of my find on 
the internet and made sure the auklet had been added to my online Ohio list.
Bill Whan
Columbus

______________________________________________________________________

Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society.
Please consider joining our Society, at www.ohiobirds.org/site/membership.php.
Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list.


You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at:
listserv.miamioh.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS
Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]