For those who are doing a "big" January or year in Ohio or for a county in Ohio, you might want to check out a feature of eBird: "Needs Alerts." http://ebird.org/ebird/alerts On the above page toward the bottom you will find a place to enter your region of interest. Start typing a county in Ohio and then select the county in which you are interested. Or you can simply type Ohio and get alerts for the whole state. You will receive email alerts for species you have not seen in a particular area. Once you report a species in the region, it will no longer appear on this alert (even if it's rare). This is designed to help you learn about new birds specific to you in a region of interest. You can set up the alert to receive an email once a day or every hour -- I suppose you would need a smart phone to get those hourly emails in the field. Once a day is sufficient for me! In the email you receive links which pop up a Google map showing you where the bird was reported. I'm already getting reports in Medina and Wayne counties of birds I have not yet seen this year. You can also use this feature when you travel out of state and want to know where people are seeing birds in the area to which you are traveling. You can turn off a particular alert when you no longer want to receive emails about it. Ken Ostermiller Westfield Center, Ohio ______________________________________________________________________ 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]