Gary, Christian, Chris (if you are listening), et al., I totally agree with Christian on this one. eBird is a fantastic source of information and should be useful for Gary's desired outcome (original email below), however I must point out something that has been frustrating me for the last few weeks on eBird. A personal desire of mine would be to have a calendar of all the possible species in my area of interest marked with the date of their highest count or highest number of checklists reporting that species so I could say to myself, "Oh yeah, it is time to go looking for murrelets!" or "Oh yeah! It's jaeger week! (similar to Discovery Channel's Shark Week)" The user interface of histograms is great if you have a specific bird you are hunting for, but when you want to ask yourself "Where should I go birding, and what should I look for this time of year?" that question is not easily answered from the histograms without a lot of scrolling or without diving into a single species account. One may argue that you can look at the high counts data in chronological order, but chronological order includes year, so the earliest record in terms of years is listed first. If the data was ordered by month then day and year was ignored (Jan 1st of any year comes before Sept 13th of any year), then it would be much more useful.
The important part here to me is that the expert user of eBird who is an expert birder in that location can easily pare down the list in their head to get the information they want. However, the inexperienced birder/eBirder doesn't have that internal database to readily pull from. This may be a recently-moved-to-the-area birder, a novice, or a person who just hasn't had enough interest until now to look for those specific dates (my personal boat). I personally glean this kind of information from posts others have made to COBirds: the best time for Sabine's Gulls in Northern Colorado is the second and third weeks of September, the best time for murrelets is the first or second week of November (I actually forget), the best time for nocturnally migrating Upland Sandpipers is the last week of August or the first week of September. But wouldn't it be nice if we just had that on a calendar? Sure I could use my personal calendar to put the date of the high counts or most checklists submitted with that species, but then it wouldn't alter with time as more data gets entered. So how many of you know that the best week to find Arctic Loon, Whooping Crane, Ancient Murrelet, and Common Ground Dove in Colorado is the second week of November? (This took some time and plenty of scrolling for me to figure this out) It is somewhat odd to think about it that way, but why not have all those species on your radar when you are out or thinking about going out birding? It will make you stop for those second glances at birds which you may think are just the usuals (Common Loon, Sandhill Crane, some sort of diving duck or grebe, or your local doves). These are the kinds of data that I think help people become better birdwatchers (okay... I should show my true colors, better listers). This is similar to the kind of information Dave Leatherman (CSU entomologist and birdwatcher) has stored in his head (on paper?) about insect species occurence in Colorado and which birds eat those insects. He knows when those insects will be hatching or invading (pardon my ignorance on the subject) so he can then find those trees most suited to hosting that insect and thus find the birds that love that as a food source at that time of year. This is different thinking than I believe most birdwatchers (personal conjecture only) have about finding species. I think the bulk of birdwatchers leave a little (a lot?) to chance or just go out looking for some birds for their own enjoyment. Sure one may monitor COBirds and say, "Hey, they are seeing Little Gulls this week, maybe I could find one of those here at my local lake instead of driving two hours to see that one..." but what if there isn't that kind of thought process or there just haven't been any sightings of that species recently to spark your own interest? This calendar would turn on your personal radar to that possibility. So, I went to Science Pipes (sciencepipes.org) to try to build my own eBird data stream to make this calendar a reality. It was not possible to build this kind of data stream, because you can only use one species at a time (from what I could tell), and there was no way to output to a calendar or a text list of dates of high counts or highest number of checklists submitted for that species. I just couldn't see a way to program this into the Science Pipes output and there is no batch method to loop through all the species to make this possible either. If I had access to the data, I could theoretically program this myself with a loop or just a database query, but that isn't possible. I envision the possibility of a form where you can customize this loop to just your target area (be it state, county, or hotspot) over your time period of interest (all year, just fall migration, just your one week visit) and maybe even limit by target species (hopefully greater than five species is possible). Then one gets back a calendar showing what the best times to go looking for that species are maybe even with a little padding on each side (depending on that species's histogram's standard deviation). Some may argue with me about the best way to view the data, but with a calendar we are then getting away from having to know what species to look for in the large dataset and getting to just viewing something easy to digest. I would even be fine with a "This week in birding your area" kind of RSS feed that sends you a weekly breakdown of what you might want to expect in your area according to historical records. We could also easily pull genus or family level data for when southerly shorebird migration starts and plot it on the calendar. (Yes I know that is hard to distinguish, so please don't argue about that, it is for example purposes only) Yes, we are puppets to the data, but this is better than nothing. I am noticing more and more that the experts are grabbing hold of eBird, but maybe the more inexperienced birders are not yet and maybe they never will have that level of interest, but this could make it more useful to the average birder. Just my two cents. Maybe you are ready to clock me for wasting all of your time, but I blame you for reading this far... ;) Just kidding. Bryan Guarente Instructional Designer The COMET Program University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Boulder, CO ________________________________ From: Christian Nunes <[email protected]> To: CObirds List <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, September 29, 2010 10:17:04 AM Subject: RE: [cobirds] Colorado Migrations Gary et al., There is a place where tremendous amounts of data have been complied and are there ready to be analyzed by anyone. Amazing amounts of information can be mined from this single source. www.ebird.org In ebird, you can "View and Explore Data." There are options that will help answer your query. You can look at bar charts of occurrences of bird species in particular regions, states, counties or even single birding spots. This helped me just last week when I wanted to remember the probability of occurrence of the three jaeger species in CO. I knew the order had been worked out, but couldn't find the specific place in my CFO Journals where Tony Leukering had described this. So I hopped on ebird and queried the seasonal occurrences of birds in CO, and it clarified my hazy memory of the order of jaeger occurrences (Long-tailed=Aug/Sept, Pomarine=Sept-Nov, Parasitic =Oct/Nov). Speculation on seasonal distributions of birds has always been a large part of the intrigue of birding for me. But, the knowledge base always came from the advice of other birders or my own records (not always, I mean never, in an organized place ripe for analysis!). There is a HUGE amount of data out there, covering decades of effort from thousands of field observers. Growing up in RI, there was a published list of the birds of RI with bar graphs depicting their seasonal occurrences. This booklet was invaluable, but I have rarely seen anything like it since. The work that went into publishing this little booklet, synthesizing data from the past 100 yrs, must have been tremendous. I think it was the hard work of a few dedicated data-freaks that was the inspiration for ebird. Now instead of waiting for a few ambitious individuals to spend half their lives synthesizing piles of data into a neat and useful presentation that is published once and then never revised, I can just go online and click a few buttons and I will receive pretty much the same information plus some. Of course there are limitations to ebird. It depends on observers entering accurate data. There are still those piles of 100 yr old records that need to be entered if we want to look at long-term trends. I have no doubt that this work will be completed at some point in the future, and for now, we still have an incredibly useful tool for making insights on bird populations, distributions and temporal occurrences. Have fun, Christian Nunes Boulder, CO [email protected] http://www.flickr.com/photos/christian_nunes/ > Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:52:54 -0700 > Subject: [cobirds] Colorado Migrations > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > > Is there historical data/graph out there that shows Colorado migration > periods/species occurrence? For example: > > 10% (early migrants) of Colorado early spring migrants occurs between > Apr-x and May-x dates > 80% (most migrants) of Colorado spring migration occurs between May-x > and May-y dates > 10% (late migrants) of Colorado late spring migrants occurs between > May-x and June-x dates > > Same for Fall migration. > > If we have that data then what species fall in early, most, late > windows? > > Don't want generalizations--be interested in seeing what data shows. > > Thanks > Gary Lefko, Nunn > http://ColoradoBirder.ning.com/ -- Home of the "Nunn Guy" > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >"Colorado Birds" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >[email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at >http://groups.google.com/group/cobirds?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cobirds?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cobirds?hl=en.
