The next 3 weeks will see a little more than 1400 birders
across Ohio counting birds in their little patch of any one
of 60+ CBC circles of 15 miles in diameter. The excitement
of the day, from slogging through inclement conditions for
one more cardinal to the final revelations during the tally at
day's end, wrapped up in the camaraderie and sense of
accomplishment of the moment, is what makes the Christmas
Bird Count great for all us. And then there are a few of us
that like to eek out just a little more. In the subsequent
months we sift through those tallies for little nuggets of
information. Not so much the oddball vagrant, but rather
for that critical threshhold for a given species that hints at
population change.
In the next 3 weeks, birders will have an opportunity to do more
than contribute to our understanding of bird populations at the
broad continental scale afforded by the Christmas Bird Count.
You will also have the opportunity to leverage those same
observations for use at the local level through the use of the
online database Project eBird.
I am making a personal appeal, for the purposes of furthering
our understanding of birds on a finer scale, where land
management decisions are most often made, that party leaders,
with their lists for that local patch that may encompass a
local city, county, or state park, preserve, wildlife area ... or
merely the local neighborhood, enter those lists with their
attendant field effort into Project eBird ...
http://ebird.org/
cheers
Vic Fazio
ice-bound in 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/.
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]
|