"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 [log in to unmask] ______________________________________________________________________ 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]