All,
The Birding Northern Virginia Calendar has ben published on line.
Find a link to it on the side bar of the Clubs & Walks page at
www.homepage.mac.com/pmkane.
The calendar can be seen in three different views, which are day,
week, and month views. I think that the calendar's month and day
views will be the most helpful to you. The default view of the
calendar will be its month view.
Click into an event posted to the calendar and a pop up window will
open describing the event in greater detail. In general, the pop up
window will list the event's sponsor, trip or event leader, contact
information, meeting place, and other event details.
Eventually, you will be able to subscribe to the calendar, much the
same way some of you subscribe to VA Bird. If you don't wish to
subscribe to the calendar, you will be able to download it to your
computer. If you only wish to view the calendar, you will be able to
access it from the web site cited above.
Please do not subscribe or download the calendar just yet. I am still
trying to figure out how some of these calendar features work, and I
want to be sure that I understand these things before others actually
begin using them. I will post something to VA Bird when the calendar
subscription and download features are available. Meanwhile, the
calendar can be accessed at the web site cited above.
A few things to understand:
This calendar is a work in progress. I expect it to evolve over time.
I will learn how to post certain events more clearly, and with your
help, more events will be published to the calendar too.
If I use a beginning time for a scheduled event, I have to report an
ending time for an event too. This is sometimes difficult. In
general, for local walks I am using an arbitrary time of 3 hours per
walk, unless I somehow knew that a given walk would take longer to
complete. Please let me know if a walk's ending time should be
corrected.
At the moment some of the pop up details for calendar events are
incomplete. I don't have the time to chase each of these details
down. But I will certainly appreciate any time you take to help me
report an event correctly.
Anyone may email me with corrections or additions to the calendar.
The on line calendar will update itself automatically anytime that I
edit the master calendar. I will be doing this as event submissions
or edits are received. (At the moment I am only looking for help
editing the May 06 calendar. I have begun working on later calendars,
but I have not yet had the time to edit any of these.)
My web site is an effort to describe the Northern Virginia birding
community to people I meet on the trail. Adding a calendar to the
Clubs and Walk page of the site helps me tell this story. We have a
lot of things going on this community, and I think that people I meet
on the trail might want to know about some of these.
Because I also believe that publishing an on line Northern Virginia
Birding Calendar can have some utility for veteran birders in our
larger community, I wanted to make the calendar available to you too.
This is one of the reasons I selected a calendar program that will
allow you to subscribe to or download it.
Here are a couple of ways this calendar might be useful to you:
Use the calendar to see what events might be taking place at a venue
on any given day, especially if you are an individual birder or
informal group wishing to bird venues at times when clubs and groups
are not scheduled at a venue.
Use the calendar to see when more than one club or group might be
scheduled to bird a venue on a given day.
Have a question about a past birding event? Use the calendar as an
archive to look up the details of past events posted to the calendar.
Are you scheduling walks and trips for a group or club? Use the
calendar to look forward to see what other events might have already
been scheduled at a venue.
Refer birders from outside Northern Virginia to the calendar,
especially if they will be visiting Northern Virginia.
Please email me if you are connected with any of the events posted to
the May 06 calendar and want me to edit the entry in any way (I
would like to make the pop up window for scheduled events as complete
as is possible), or, if you would like to add a calendar entry to the
calendar for May 06 or beyond.
All other constructive comments should be sent to me off line. I am
not seeking to begin the thread of a larger conversation regarding
this initiative on VA Bird.
This is the 21st century, and I don't see any reason why the Northern
Virginia birding community cannot publish a single, global,
electronic calendar. As I said earlier, I am quite certain this
project will evolve over time. I hope that each of you will find a
way to support this initiative in one way or another.
Regards,
Paul Kane
Falls Church, VA
