Hello MDOsprey,
I hope at least a few of you remember an ex-pat Marylander who will always consider Annapolis "home". Starting in July 2007 I began working for eBird and Norm gave me permission to post this note about the eBird "Google Gadget", which every MDOsprey subscriber should have on their iGoogle page. All we need now is people who have seen Red-necked Stint and White Ibis this week to enter them into eBird! (MD and DC currently have no "gadget birds", but check out New York, California, or Texas!)
See below...
eBIRD NEWS FLASH: Across the country, there are legions of birders (perhaps even you) that are tied to their local birding listserv, checking back in hourly to see if any new, rare bird has appeared in their local Region. Has the Brooklyn, NY, Western Reef-Heron been seen today? It is August and shorebirds are streaming through—has anyone discovered a Little Stint? What about a Red-necked? These bewildered vagrant birds were once collected with shotguns; then were shared among small circles of friends and ever expanding phone trees; then phone-in rare bird alerts widened the rare bird audience; and online RBAs widened the audience further. Now listservs, working in tandem with RBAs, provide real-time accessibility to rare bird reports.
Rarity lovers now have a new tool at their disposal—the GOOGLE GADGET. This is a small device that can be added to an iGoogle homepage, or any webpage, and displays the week’s rarest birds in whatever state you select. The gadget gives observer name, date, and location, including a Google Maps plot of the location of the bird—within seconds you can get printable directions from your home or office! It even gives an indication of whether the sighting has been confirmed by a local expert (something listservs do not always provide). Some people have 5 or more gadgets loaded at the same time displaying all their favorite local states.
The gadget is updated every 15 minutes and works off submissions to eBird—only by entering a sighting into eBird will it be displayed. Read more about the gadget, learn how to get it, and enter your sightings (not just of rare birds), at http://ebird.org (once there, click on the Fork-tailed Flycatcher for more information about the gadget). Participation in eBird has the larger goal of providing data valuable to researchers, land managers, and even curious birders. Bar graphs and maps can be easily generated or your sightings or of all sightings submitted of a particular species or a particular location or hotspot.
So, check out the Google Gadget. It might be the first place that news breaks about the next mega-rarity in Maryland or DC!
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Marshall J. Iliff
West Roxbury, MA
miliff AT aol.com
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eBird/AKN Project Leader
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
159 Sapsucker Woods Rd.
Ithaca, NY 14850
http://www.ebird.org
http://www.avianknowledge.net
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