DaveA's International Adventure with some Birding Thrown In - Number's Summary

I am a huge fan of international travel. Travel in general really, but due to the financial and time constraints that are real life, international travel is always a special opportunity, and one that I am sure readers will find, gets me firing on all cylinders. For those who don't know, I am the proud son of a naturalized US Citizen, my Dad, who grew up in Loughborough, England. As such, I began my international travels at the ripe age of 2, on a visit to meet the family. Since that early trip my visits have been too far between, but perhaps due to their rarity they have forged strong memories. The places and faces of my family's England are certainly never far out of mind. So perhaps it was fitting, that three years after beginning to document my odd combination of birds, photos, and the rest of my wanderings in the natural world that I should expand the scope of my perspective back to a foreign land that is at the same time so familiar to me.

For those whose eyes are already glazed over, browse on to any more entertaining sites, I recommend Top Gear for any Yanks that aren't familiar with it, or Nature Photographers for a quick juicy photo fix. The pretty pictures are likely to follow at a snails pace - recall that I still have posts from Florida, (May), and Grand Junction, (later May), and New Orleans, (August) in the works, and now many thousands of photos to work through so they will be coming - in their own good time.

Disclaimer aside, if anyone is still reading... this post is primarily wordy, a bit of background on my diverse interests that make traveling a holistic experience, and then the stats on the birds and some impressions that I had specific to birding. My scholastic background is history. Being such, for much of the trip I had a recurring Simpson's quote in my head - "everything here is something", - Marge Simpson. After checking it, I do recall now that it was in the Rio episode, but it completely fits with the amazing way that history permeates all aspects of life in Europe. There will be more to follow on some of the amazing sights I had the chance to see, but those along with family, scenery, food and drink, art, and just generally observing the flow and currents of life in the UK would have left me feeling hopelessly cheated had I dedicated my time and focus to birds alone. For some, birding is passion enough, and focused pursuit of all the unusual species the island has to offer would be reason enough to travel and return. For me though, I took the birds that came, and didn't sweat those that I didn't see. In this visit I barely reached coasts - viewing the Irish Sea for my first time from the car in a gale - a huge no-no for a birding visit, but perfectly fine for my style of travel. I wouldn't have traded all the great memories I made, and the lure of future visits to coastal regions keeps me thinking of the next trip.

So, all that being what it was, I toured, and watched, and took opportunities to place myself where birds may come my way - and for no guides or experience - I had a great time and really enjoyed the species I found. Here's the list, a few familiar names, and a few surprises:

*I see that a few of my checklists somehow didn't make their way into ebird, so there may be an update to species list and totals. I know for one House Sparrow is missing, but that may be it.


Of course many of these will be featured in posts to come, but a few quick impressions and highlights. Least expected bird that I saw in good numbers, Ring-necked Parakeet. Bird that I saw in surprising abundance, Common Pheasant. My first bird outside the US, Common Magpie. Common species that will make you think you have six different species, only to find they are all variations of the same - Mallard. Cool birds I wish I had had better looks at - Great Spotted Woodpecker, Eurasian Jay, Long-tailed Tit, Mandarin Duck.

"My Ebird" as it stands now (subject to updates):

Just as I was wrapping this post up, I checked back to my post from last year on the 20th, it is good to know that some of the ideas I found reinforced in my travels this year are the same that were worthy of note last year as well. I certainly hope that they remain.

2011 Count: 256

Lifetime: 325

Web Goodies

Just a fun diversion and a new aspect of ebird to share as we hopefully all have a bit of downtime coming. First up, the Wordle above is a little web gadget that analyses a blog or news feed, and then makes a cloud diagram. It seems to be making the rounds of some of the blogs, and as there hasn't been much bird content since the weekend I thought I would give it a whirl this evening. Totally pointless, but a cool representation. I'm thinking they read the colors of the template as well to get the blues and greens for mine. Do you have a blog or webpage, might want to wordle it up to see what you have been focusing on. Thanks to Dawn and her Bloggy Blog for sharing.

On a moderately more functional topic.....there have been some great new developments over at Ebird of late. In what will hopefully be a well timed release ebird launched a beta "My Yard Lists" functionality at the beginning of the Christmas Bird Count season. In addition to birders like myself that head out into the field to count the birds in a count circle, the Audubon also encourages feeder watchers to record their counts for the day and add them to the compiled data. It is a great way to include anyone who can't or for whatever reason won't head out into the mid-winter elements to count birds. As many of you already know, sometimes the best way to find rare or secretive birds is just to bribe them with a snack. I have a couple of feeders that I try to keep stocked, but am personally not much of a yard birder. Frankly, I am just not around enough to know what is coming by, and have been lazy about monitoring with the birdcam.

Anyhow, for those who do watch for birds to come visiting your homes I highly encourage you to create a location for your yard in Ebird, and then designate that location as your yard list. The yard, or patch lists are also available, can then be viewed by other birders to see what has been recorded by you. As you can see, my yard is representing those of us who are just starting out or don't have incredible habitats, so no need to feel like your yard isn't good enough to share.

Even one yard list a month for a year from every ebirder would be an incredible data set. More specific to the birders though, it is another fun way to enjoy and share what you are seeing in the natural world.

I just read about, and started exploring this feature today, and already had a 'holy cow - that was cool' moment. Today I was using ebird to list the bird species reported so far in Hennepin County, MN this month. I pulled the list and compared it to my own, and found that there were three new species reported. I was able to see the mapped approximate locations and the name of the birder who recorded the sighting. From there I found that one of the birders had reported a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker in their "Patch List", and as a result I saw a handful of reports by the same birder, for the same location this month. I could then see what other species were turning up in the same area. I exchanged quick emails with the other birder, who kindly shared even more detail about the location, and hopefully was happy to know that their local park was providing a view of the area birds to a person several states away thanks to their effort.

I doubt that this was exactly the usage the good folks at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had in mind for this expansion, but I find it incredibly informative when planning to visit a location and trying to get up to speed. Another good tool along those lines are the state online bird forums or mailing list archives. Googling a city, or better a county and rare bird usually will provide a good starting point to track one down. I am spoiled by Colorado's on a daily basis, and had fun reading what has been turning up in Minnesota recently as well.

eBird and Me @ 18 Months

Please bear with me if you are a reader or first time visitor who came across this post looking for photos. This post is a bit of a recap of a birding tool that I rely on constantly, and some of the cool things that can be done with personal data as it begins to accumulate.

That birding tool, one that more and more birders are using, is eBird. eBird is a sightings database developed and maintained by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I was a bit surprised a few days back to realize just how few birders are aware of eBird, or are perhaps intimidated by it. I cannot emphasize just how critical this tool is to my birding activity, and to my development as a birder. Hopefully what follows will encourage you to check it out if you have not already done so... or more likely if you are a blog reading birder, have already checked it out and have fallen out of the habit of entering count results.

First a bit of background about my birding, how eBird became so critical to me, and why this topic came up for me on this first day of April. I can write with certainty that my 'official' birding birthday is October 20th. Specifically it was October 20th, 2008. While I remember that first solo bird walk clearly, that is a story for a different post. What is more germane to this topic was that I happened to document those first species I identified on my walk in my brand new eBird account.

I had been exposed to wildlife and bird watching as a kid. I had even used a field guide and made a few attempts at keeping a list. However, I have a big problem with keeping paper records. Until the arrival of online banking my checkbook register was a constant mess, and I had a reason to keep that straight for most of my life. Imagine how well I fared trying to keep a bird checklist on paper over the years. My few attempts were years apart, and all were restarted when 'the' list had gone missing in the interim.

As I was spending a bit of time online attempting to identify my trigger bird, I came across eBird.org and quickly created my account. It was the answer to my paper management crisis - a site that I could always return to where my sightings would be preserved and available for updates or reference without having to manage and keep a physical list. Just like online banking it made all the difference for me.

So now, 18 months later, I have amassed my own growing data set. While I am not a professional researcher I am always finding new ways to manipulate this data and get new looks at my lists. For this post I am going to explore a couple of the results from "My Summary Tables" under the "view and explore data" section of eBrid.

To start I pulled my results from the past month:



The screenshot shows the top of the report. Below the summary is a list of species, showing which of the five day periods each was seen in. The report details give me my total number of species and checklists submitted, all the locations I reported from (these are selected when configuring the report by selecting the first location, then scrolling to the bottom and selecting the last while holding 'shift' in windows). The summary breaks the month into five day periods and helps to give me a feel for how the month broke down.

To compare those results I pulled up my list from last March:

With a full year under my belt my numbers have increased as expected. I can quickly see that my most productive period in March '09 was from the 11th to the 15th. With that information I select March '09 from my blog archives, and find that on the 14th I had participated in my first Denver Field Ornithologists field trip. That accounted for a good spike in my species total for that period. Even if I didn't have a handy blog with color photographs to flip back to I could still have pulled up my checklists for that period. That would have let me review my sightings and notes all from within eBird.

That is not all the "My_Summary_Tables" has to offer though. Here is a capture of the first query configuration screen:

Very straightforward. Just select the range of report and a start date, it does the rest. One nit that I have is that there is no option to create a date range report. I would like to be able to compare my year to date species totals with the total I had for the same range in previous years, but have not been able to do so in an easy manner yet. Who knows, perhaps that functionality will come along at some time in the future.

Here is the year view for my first calendar year, 2008. I had 44 checklists and 79 species in three calendar months of counting. It was a good start, and as the summary shows things really heated up in December when I participated in my first two Christmas Bird Counts.

With last year's results I have my first opportunity to look at a year in total. At a glance I can tell that things are about to heat up big time. Last year I had a big month in April that was boosted by a road trip across Nebraska and into Iowa. This year the family is coming out to Colorado, so I already know that I will have to work for similar totals this month.

Even without a long trip planned during migration I am happy with the first quarter of 2010. I have had the chance to see a Snowy Owl, several Barrow's Goldeneyes, a Harris's Sparrow and a Golden-crowned Sparrow already this year, and can't wait to see what surprises await in the next three quarters.

If you haven't already done so, or if it has been a while, be sure to check out eBird soon. There are a variety of new features that will make the birding you do, and the birding you've done all the more enjoyable. All the while contributing to the larger pool of knowledge that is available to the public about birds in the United States and Canada.