[TN-Bird] Suggestion concerning eBird

I am sure that most of you are familiar with eBird even if you do not submit 
your sightings to it.  In case you are not, here is a quote from their 
webpage:

"eBird, a project developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the 
National Audubon Society, provides a simple way for you to keep track of the 
birds you see anywhere in North America. You can retrieve information on 
your bird observations, from your backyard to your neighborhood to your 
favorite bird-watching locations, at any time for your personal use. You can 
also access the entire historical database to find out what other eBirders 
are reporting from across North America. In addition, the cumulative eBird 
database is used by birdwatchers, scientists, and conservationists who want 
to know more about the distributions and movement patterns of birds across 
the continent."

I have a suggester as to how our Knoxville chapter of TOS (or any other 
chapter or birding group) might use eBird to create a permanent record of 
the chapter's field trips.  We could create a log-in and password for KTOS 
with eBird and use that to record the birds that are observed and counted on 
the chapter's field trips.  This would not only give us a historical record 
of the trips but would benefit science as well as this kind of count (with 
multiple observers) is arguably the most valuable.  I have been making 
sporadic submissions to eBird for a couple years now, mostly of the birds I 
see at home. I did submit one report of a field trip to Cove Lake earlier 
this year based upon the trip leader's submission of the list to this list 
(after checking with him and ascertaining that he was not going to submit 
it).  It does not appear to me that many of our field trips are getting 
submitted to eBbird and I think this is a shame as they would be a great 
source of data.

The only information that would need to be kept  in addition to the species 
and numbers of birds observed would be the number of observers, the starting 
time and durations of the trip, and an estimate of the area covered, either 
in miles, kilometers  or acres.  Many of the places we go are already 
locations entered as "hotspots" in eBird.  For those that are not someone 
would have to plot the location, which is sometimes easy and sometimes not. 
The coordinates of certain places such as dams, bends, etc. can be found on 
TopoZone, for instance.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this for a while and was curious as to what 
other people might think of the idea.

Carole Gobert
Knoxville, Tennessee


=================NOTES TO SUBSCRIBER=====================

The TN-Bird Net requires you to sign your messages with
first and last name, city (town) and state abbreviation.
You are also required to list the count in which the birds
you report were seen.  The actual date of observation should
appear in the first paragraph.
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