[texbirds] Ebird miscellaneous thoughts
- From: "Collins, Fred (Commissioner Pct. 3)" <Fred_Collins@xxxxxxxx>
- To: "1 Texbirds (texbirds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)" <texbirds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:01:23 +0000
I find e-bird an extremely useful tool. A free database maintained by a
professional staff. How can we be so blessed? It was a God-send for our records
at Kleb Woods Nature Preserve. With it we generate our checklist. BTW, you can
pick one up here at the park or download it from our web site. It's a nice
color bar-graph checklist. The checklist is easy to make with good Ebird data.
In updating our list and making list for other parks we use all Ebird data for
the parks, not just our entries. We have detected problems with the data
however. It arises we believe from some people misusing the database. When
people come to Kleb to bird they may only enter one checklist for the day and
seem to include a stray bird or two which they may have observed in route or
nearby but not actually at Kleb Woods. A dead giveaway is when they have a
string of water birds instead of the one or two species we normally see. Or a
list including several species of ducks is also a tip-off. They didn't want to
take the time to put in a general area county list or a specific list for
another site with only a few species. We have discovered that we cannot use the
general site list from Ebird to accurately reflect what actually occurs at Kleb.
We have weekly or more frequent surveys and list for ten-plus years with likely
more than 2000 party hours. Even with such extensive data, Ebird still uses
regional filters instead of the site's existing database. Consequently, someone
could come to Kleb and see a new bird for the park and it would not even be
flagged for review. Harris County has almost 400 species of regularly occurring
species and our park list is a bit under 240. Almost half of the regularly
occurring birds shown on the Ebird entry list would be new records for the park
and many highly unlikely.
I know some listers are using Ebird solely as a way to keep track of their
year-list and or county list and such miss-cues as suggested above are
therefore almost encouraged. There is no penalty for miss using Ebird for
personal reasons or benefits. This lessens the usefulness of data for specific
sites. In the million plus records this has little bearing on bird distribution
generally in the United States but it has great implications for the small
parks and reserves we all like to bird.
As a representative of one such place, I ask you to take more care when posting
list to places that can make good use of quality data for these small sites.
Fred Collins
(281) 357-5324
Director: Kleb Woods Nature Center
Cypress Top Historical Park
Commissioner Steve Radack
Harris County Precinct 3
www.pct3.hctx.net<http://www.pct3.hctx.net>
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