I just wanted to give everyone a heads up as you enter your winter records for seasonal field reports. As many of you know, there are two similar but divergent systems for reporting birds in Iowa. In a nutshell, I am attempting to make our data compatible with eBird so that there may someday be some exchange of information and we continue to have a good picture of the state of Iowa's birds. The one critical piece to making this happen is to align location names so there is an exact match. The Iowa eBird group is now working our way through the matching of place names to eBird hotspots which are publically accessible sites. By time we are done hope to have a large menu of places where data can be shared. We hope that eBird users will use these hotspots as much as possible when entering their checklists and that those entering data through the IOU website will select those areas highlighted as much as possible.
The heads up concerns some change to familiar places. For instance, all of the areas around Saylorville are prefaced with Saylorville Reservoir -- xxx so Jester Park is now known as Saylorville Reservoir - Jester Park. I may be contacting some of you for some help; i.e., is the proper name Hanlontown Marsh or Hanlontown Slough? The changes will be evolutionary and not be done for a few weeks I suspect, but please be aware as you enter your records and don't create a new location unless it truly doesn't exist. Thanks. Ann Johnson Norwalk, IA --- Please contribute your sightings to our list; it is only as good as members make it! --- Birding channel recommendation for FRS/GMRS radio use: Primary selection; channel 5/0 , alternate selection; channel 6/0 --- This mailing list is sponsored by the Iowa Ornithologists' Union. Membership available on-line at http://www.iowabirds.org/iou/PayDues.aspx. ----- You are currently subscribed to ia-bird as: [email protected]
