The Ohio effort with Project eBird continues to grow and I thank all of you who are participating in this checklist program. November ended with a little more than 1200 checklist submissions and December is off to a good start. As a gauge of growth, the 80+ thousand data entries for the spring season 08 compares with a little more than 50 thousand the year before. But it is not necessary to be an active participant to take advantage of this resource. While this is ultimately a tool for conservation (building local databases property by property), birders can also track bird movements to their advantage. From time to time you may wish to step back and see the forest for the trees. As an exercise to introduce those unfamilar with eBird or have not been by the website http://ebird.org/ in the last 6 months to review the many cool new features, I thought to put together these instructions demonstrating how one may quickly examine eBird for trends ... If you care to please visit http://ebird.org/ now ... (or save for a dreary, bitter day) ... from the Welcome Page ... scroll down past the eBird Photo pool (new feature ... if you like take a moment to check out the cool Eurasian Wigeon X American hybrid) ... to the Most Checklists Submitted for Current Month ... There find Ohio ... barely leading Texas at the moment in the standings and select OHIO Up comes the 2008 bar chart of sightings to date ... ignore the 326 species total (it includes 15 non species taxa). These sightings are a composite of filtered listings with several hundred individually vetted by myself (I'll spare you the details but if asked I will provide details of what takes 20hrs/month). I only mention this as a remarkable amount of correspondence reflects the opinion this database has no such constraints. First up SNOWY OWL ... scroll down to select Snowy Owl If on the way a favorite species catches your eye ... by all means take your time .. in doing so you just might find yourself marveling at how well the bar chart mirrors published bar charts for the state ... not bad for a bunch of amateurs ;-) Selecting Snowy Owl will bring up the Frequency chart for that species and a bunch of other stats you can ignore at the moment. If you do not have broad band ... this can take a couple of minutes -sorry. Once the clock has wound down, hopefully the MAP tab is showing at right. Select MAP. A map should appear ... if not refer to the instructions regarding flash player at the bottom of the page ... again sorry but old systems (my 9 yr old Win98 machine included) may well have trouble loading the player. The map should depict 8 of the 9 reports I have seen thus far this fall season. If you wish a closer view of one of these ... at the county level .. find the CHANGE LOCATION tab above the map and to the right. Select Change Location. Under the United States menu find Ohio and highlight that entry (it may take a few seconds for the full menu to appear). With Ohio selected, select the radio button for Counties in Ohio. Select Continue at the bottom of the page. In this example try Lucas County. Repeat the above instructions regarding Map selection. Unfortunately, eBird 2.0 cannot zoom in further on these records ... that feature is reserved for flagged records (more on that later). Now let's take a look at White-winged Crossbill. You could start all over again but hardly necessary ... above the map to the left find the CHANGE SPECIES tab. Type in White-winged Crossbill ... and select the menu offering. Deselect the Snowy Owl ... and click CONTINUE. You are now looking this year's reports in Lucas County by Greg Links, Matt Anderson, and Aaron Boone ... if you don't recall Aaron's report it is because it was WAY BACK in MAY ... just a little ahead of the curve. But we're interested in the recent flight so next up the CHANGE DATE tab select ENTIRE YEAR ... yeah that May record will still be there but unfortunately eBird 2.0. allows for only a seasonal breakdown which does not help us here. NOTE: here you can change the year entry should you wish a historical perspective later. NOTE: except that so little historical data has been entered that this will be of limited interest for now. Select Continue ... and follow-up with a CHANGE LOCATION tab selection. You should find Ohio highlighted with counties also selected ... change the radio button selection to ENTIRE REGION ... and CONTINUE. The larger the database the system is calling up, the slower. With the Frequency chart up again, select the MAP tab for what should be a presentation of 14 locations (13 in the past 10 days). And there you are ... negotiated your way through the core data of eBird. There's more of course but hopefully this provides some impetus for taking a closer look at eBird at your leisure. And who knows, after seeing all the gaps in coverage across the state, and across the bar charts, perhaps you will entertain entering a checklist or two ... from time to time. Now I did mention something about flagged records and pinpointing these. There are two avenues whereby a rare record can be found precisely ... and I mean down to the lightpole or bush providing the author of the record made that specific effort. From the Welcome Page ... scroll down at the bottom right to access Jack Siler's eBird rarity map. Select OH. This Google Maps program allows one to zoom down to the precise location of a bird ... or at least the birding site depending on how precise the observer chose to be. The other limitation is that Jack picks up only those species flagged by the system owing to what the checklist filters determine are species normally absent. A Snowy Owl in Cleveland is not going to get flagged ... where one would be in Columbus or Cincinnati. There is also the iGoogle Gadget alert system. This will alert you (the instant an eBird report is made) to those entries within eBird where a user had to click the "rare species" link for a given region in Ohio and update your google webpage with the most recent 7 days of reports. These reports also have maps attached, a notation as to whether I have vetted the report, and other information. Again, to the degree the observer has chosen to locate the bird, one will be able to zoom into that location. And given the high grade satellite imagery in Google, it is entirely possible to locate the very light lightpole upon a Snowy might sit. I wish to be clear that this is no substitute for the various birding forums on the Internet. It does not substitute for directions which often offer up valuable insight as to how best to approach a location, where to park etc. Nor does it substitute for documentations. But I do consider it a valuable tool for birders and avian conservationists. One last item about conservation. Among the many attributes of eBird, one stands out as unique. This is a database of sightings tied directly to a geographic position with unearthly precision. That may seem obvious to many, yet I find the implications of that frequently overlooked or misunderstood. Please consider that land management practices ultimately boil down to what we do with individual properties. Ohio faces some tough challenges from development. Ask yourself this when you get the call about a threat to your local park system, will the data be there to back up local land managers in their efforts to secure the future of that site. Linking the Important Bird Areas program of Audubon to eBird is good example. But without greater participation, my fear is this ... that there will come a time when we will need to tilt at windmills, but in our ignorance find that is all we are doing. Vic Fazio State Reviewer - Ohio, Project ebird Regional Editor: OH-WV-PA, North American Birds Lawton, OK ______________________________________________________________________ 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/. 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