After recovering from a successful CBC in Fort Collins yesterday (97 species), I got out this afternoon to enjoy the sunshine. At Lake Loveland swim beach, I estimated more than a thousand birds in the northwest lagoon by the swim beach. Most of these were Cackling Goose (this is a great spot to compare Cackling Goose and Canada Goose at close range), but there was also a Greater White-fronted Goose and Ross's Goose. Hopefully, these uncommon species will stick around long enough to be counted for the Loveland CBC on January 1. If you are interested in participating in that event, please email me to request a team assignment (I will be compiling again this year). A few miles away at Boyd Lake State Park, there was a great variety of species including an uncommon Red-breasted Merganser (north end) and a Bonaparte's Gull (Marina). My ebird checklist for Boyd Lake is here: http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S20978902 . In recent weeks, David Suddjian suggested that folks who contribute their sightings to ebird.org (hopefully everyone on this list) can maximize the scientific benefits of their birding by visiting geographic areas that are underrepresented in the ebird coverage maps, and thus filling in data gaps. Another way of maximizing your impact on ebird is to visit your favorite hotspots during weeks when that location's bar chart is incomplete. For example, I noticed that several common species at Boyd Lake were absent from Boyd Lake's bar chart at ebird.org for the third week of December. Well, after spending 2 hours there today, I think 7 new species are now represented on the bar chart for the third week of December. To have this type of impact, your submitted checklists must be "complete" rather than "incidental". If you look at the bar chart for Boyd Lake, you will note that the last week of December is grayed out, which means there are no complete checklists submitted yet for the final week (actually 10 days). So any checklist submitted for Boyd Lake during the remainder of this month will have a great impact on filling in a data gap in the ebird database! Try exploring the bar chart of your local birding patch to see where there are still data gaps that need filling. Nick Komar Fort Collins CO
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