Hi Steve & All,
Great to hear of this opportunity for birders to get involved in
monitoring birds at Jackson Bottom!
Finding ways for birders to contribute their sightings to conservation &
monitoring efforts at local sites was a major motivation for developing
the BirdNotes database (www.birdnotes.net), which was developed by
Portland Audubon's own Don Baccus and has been up and running since
1999.
I've been in touch with Joe Liebezeit and Jay Withgott about this
project, and will be working with them to help extract the BirdNotes
data in a form that will be most useful for this project. By rough
numbers, the data in BirdNotes account for around 1/3 of the census
counts (as we call them, or "checklists," as eBird calls them) that have
been recorded for Jackson Bottom in this millennium. As I told Joe &
Jay, and I'm sure Don agrees, this is very much in the spirit of what
BirdNotes was established for.
Sadly at least one Oregon birder who recorded data for Jackson Bottom on
BirdNotes over the past 15 years has passed away, and a couple of others
have moved away (Has anyone heard from Tom Ewert after he went to
Afghanistan as part of his work for Mercy Corps?). Thankfully Phillip
Kline has returned to us, after his sojourn in Arozona.
But the upshot is that some people who recorded data on BirdNotes 10 or
15 years ago are not available to sign off on any protocols or field
orientation.
It's a sad thing, but a reality for any project that spans a couple of
decades. My job is to make sure that the efforts of departed birders
like Terrie Murray, Leroy Fish, and Alan Reid are made available to
efforts like this, that they surely would have approved of.
But I trust that this project will do its best to make use of recent
historical data, by birders who recorded their observations using the
best web-based bird database that was available prior to 2006 (or
arguably 2010).
Good birding,
Joel
--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis
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