Paul and everyone —
Thanks very much, Paul, for your thoughts on Field Notes and Oregon Birds. I’d
known you had ideas and preferences but did not know what exactly they were, so
this is helpful to have them spelled out in such detail. I would love to see a
copy of the examples for 2021 you say you've developed.
I would welcome a public discussion of this topic on OBOL — as the current
editor of Oregon Birds, I could certainly learn from it and put it to use, as
could our new Field Notes editor, Lorin Wilkerson. So if people wish to chime
in, that would be great. But I’ll also add that we at OBA and Oregon Birds
have already been thinking about this and aiming to put a plan in motion….
Members of OB's Editorial Advisory Board have suggested — and I agree — that we
conduct a survey of the OBA membership to gather data on (broadly) what they
want to see in the journal, and (more specifically) what they want to see in
Field Notes. We all recognize that as birding coverage increases and as
technologies evolve, the optimal means of communicating and archiving records
of bird sightings also changes. Beyond the question of whether the current
iteration of Field Notes offers the best presentation of information, there are
more fundamental questions — e.g., whether its focus should be more on rare
species or on general trends and patterns, and whether Field Notes should be
print or digital, or some combination of print and digital. eBird in
particular has changed the overall context for these considerations, as it
offers an immense database that anyone can mine for the information they desire
at any time. So the question of how we can best summarize, present, and
archive bird sightings via Oregon Birds and/or the OBA website and/or perhaps
other channels is a complex and dynamic question that surely will elicit
different answers from different people.
Given the need to get the journal back on schedule as our new team learned
existing protocol, we opted to put off the release of a membership survey until
sometime after the Spring issue. We’re all volunteers and this stuff is
time-consuming, but hopefully we can make this happen in the summer or fall.
Until then, the Spring issue of OB will feature traditional Field Notes
summarizing the bird-sighting highlights of the year 2022, broken down into 16
regions and authored by experts from each region — the result of an immense
number of volunteer-hours of loving labor. It will be enjoyable reading with
great photos, will help us all better understand patterns of status and
distribution, and will help archive the sightings for the historical record. I
look forward to seeing it all in print — and then I will look forward to input
from OBA’s members about what the future of Field Notes should look like.
But yes, for anyone who wishes, the conversation can begin here and now — Lorin
and I will welcome that and absorb it all. Thanks again, Paul, for your
long-standing, deep, and caring interest and participation in what our
community has been trying to accomplish with Field Notes through the years.
Jay Withgott
Editor, Oregon Birds
Portland
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