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 =================NOTES TO SUBSCRIBER===================== The TN-Bird Net requires you to SIGN YOUR MESSAGE with first and last name, CITY (TOWN) and state abbreviation. You are also required to list the COUNTY in which the birds you report were seen. The actual DATE OF OBSERVATION should appear in the first paragraph. _____________________________________________________________ To post to this mailing list, simply send email to: tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx _____________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, send email to: tn-bird-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field. ______________________________________________________________ TN-Bird Net is owned by the Tennessee Ornithological Society Neither the society(TOS) nor its moderator(s) endorse the views or opinions expressed by the members of this discussion group. Moderator: Wallace Coffey, Bristol, TN wallace@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ------------------------------ Assistant Moderator Andy Jones Cleveland, OH ------------------------------- Assistant Moderator Dave Worley Rosedale, VA __________________________________________________________ Visit the Tennessee Ornithological Society web site at http://www.tnbirds.org * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ARCHIVES TN-Bird Net Archives at //www.freelists.org/archives/tn-bird/ MAP RESOURCES Tenn.Counties Map at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/states/tennessee3.gif Aerial photos to complement google maps http://local.live.com _____________________________________________________________