[TN-Bird] eBird news and plug

Howdy to all,

I am taking over as the local eBird reviewer for the western half of  
Tennessee, taking some of the workload off of Stephen Stedman who has  
been shouldering this responsibility for the entire state. For those  
who are not familiar with it, eBird is a project by Cornell and  
Audubon that provides an online database where you can report,  
record, and manage your birding data, and have your personal  
observations be part of an enormous and growing pan-American  
dataset.  You can also generate summary maps, graphs, and bar graph  
checklists using just your own observations or the entire database.   
It's quite a powerful tool for organizing your records as well as  
tracking and studying birds throughout the New World.  Have a look at  
it:

http://ebird.org/

The job of the reviewer is simply to look over reports of more  
unusual species, find out more specifics of the sightings in some  
cases, and then approve records as valid for inclusion in the public  
database.  What this means is that as an eBird user you will  
occasionally get a friendly e-mail from a reviewer asking for more  
details on a sighting.  We don't edit or alter your own personal  
records; we just check through the unusual sightings before they go  
into the public data.  You can keep whatever records you like in your  
own personal data.  As a major eBird user (I have 34 years of data  
entered into it), I can say that the review process has actually been  
very helpful, catching quite a few typos and errors that were lurking  
in my field notes over the decades.

Going through the reports today, I see we have quite a few hard- 
working regular contributors in this area; thank you all!  And we can  
always use more; it is hard to imagine that it could be possible to  
have too many contributors.  If you don't yet use any computer system  
for organizing your data, this is a great place to start.  Your data  
are backed up permanently on the eBird servers, so if the dog eats  
your field notebooks you will still have all your notes.  If you are  
already using a computer system, consider also sending your data in  
to eBird.  They are rapidly expanding the tools for transferring data  
from other software; they have just announced utilities to work with  
AviSys.  Again, it'll give you an off-site backup if your own copy of  
your data is damaged or lost; and it will allow the wider birding and  
ornithological communities to benefit from your data for fun and for  
science.

Good birding, and good eBirding!

Bill Pulliam
Hohenwald, Lewis County, TN


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