Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 13:53:45 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Scott Crabtree Subject: MDO Community Thoughts on eBird? - Longish MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Osprey-ers; I've recently begun using eBird, http://www.ebird.org/content/index.html, and wondered about your thoughts on its use. Certainly, one answer could be, "Use it if you want," sort of like the answers on what's a life list. But, I had some other thoughts. It's my understanding that in some circles, "birders" aren't always that well thought of. Some wildlife biologists may look askance at birders as a group who doesn't follow any scientific precepts. Some in the environmental community may view birders as those who are just out to the get the "tick" without concern for environmental issues. Don't shoot the messenger - I'm just laying out some perceptions that have been the subject of letters to editors and have been in other list services. I'm not "shilling" for eBird. While it has its warts, I can't help but wonder if it's a useful tool for real documentation of our collective sightings that could help the biological world, environmental causes, and contribute to birding's own literature. With its requirement for not only species count, but numbers of individuals, time spent in field, distance traveled, etc, eBird has at least a bit more science to it than just reporting exciting species. Would such information be useful to the MD birding community, and its publications? In 1973, Prof. William Engel at UNC-Chapel Hill taught his last class in Vertebrate Field Zoology, and there I learned the Grinnell system for keeping field notes. I use that class as my start date in birding, and ever since then, just about every book I come across advocates the keeping of field notes of some sort. While it requires a lot of discipline, most of us keep some sort of field records, but what happens to them? Some are sitting around in boxes somewhere, some make it into periodicals, and some just disappear. Some records show up in MDOsprey, and feed American Birds, and MD Birdlife. Yet those publications are generally about extra-limital records - early and late dates, great numbers, new records, etc. Trends of increases or decreases in occurrences are often anecdotal, and there is little concrete data on common species. In other words, just the sort of data needed to feed future editions of the Yellowbook. This is not an indictment of American Birds, or MD Birdlife - they certainly serve a necessary purpose. (And I may have cartoon'd their purpose. No offense meant - it was just shorthand.) I'm just wondering if there is a good place for our collective records to come together to support all of those publications, and would eBird be such a place? So, beyond what you think of the eBird concept, do the regional editors for American Birds, the editors of MD Birdlife, the formulators of the next edition of the Yellowbook use eBird as a source? Would they? Does anyone think that's a good tool to use to collect records, or is there a better one? Do those editors already have enough (or too much) data to use? Comments welcome on all points, hopefully on-list. Flames can be sent off-list. (they might go to auto-delete though!) Scott Crabtree Chester, MD crabtree@myshorelink.com ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================