Greetings,

As regional editor for North American Birds, I try to take a look at every
email on MDOsprey to see if there are birds of interest for the seasonal report.
 Add to that a few listservs in Virginia (the region covers both states), and
I end up reading a ton of email.  That said, while I agree it is easier to
read things in list format, it isn't particularly difficult for me to scan a
paragraph and pull out the noteworthy birds.  Uppercase letters do make things
stand out, but I don't use them in my own reports to listservs.  To me, I say to
each their own.  I don't love the idea of each report looking the same.

One thing I would like to request is that people put a locality and date on
their posts.  I end up with a few inaccuracies in my reports, many stemming
from taking the date of the report as the date the bird was seen, and often that
isn't the case.  Also, a lot of places in Maryland and Virginia are unknown to
me, and it takes a bit of digging or follow-up emails sent to folks to figure
out what county the bird was seen in.  It seems like it wouldn't be too
difficult to track these things down, but sometimes there are dozens of such birds
that I need to determine where they were seen.

Despite my efforts of reading email to help compile the seasonal report, I
would love to encourage more people to send me a report at the end of the
reporting periods (30 November, 28 February, 31 May, and 31 July).  I certainly miss
a fair amount of birds that I would like to include in the column, and only
way to be sure I know about them is in a report sent to me.

Best,

Todd

---------------------------------------
Todd Michael Day
Jeffersonton, Virginia, USA
Culpeper County

---------------------------------------