Let 2019 be the year to step up your eBirding. If you have enjoyed tapping into eBird reports from others, contribute your own sightings in 2019. Submit a sighting online or via eBird Mobile to see just how easy it is to join the world’s largest birding community. If you have been eBirding for a long time, add a few more checklists from your home or submit a few more photos and audio recordings. Have you been meaning to enter old records that you’d like to have in eBird? Every sighting matters. New Year’s Resolutions are a way to set fun challenges and personal goals. Read on for some ideas for eBird Resolutions and how to make birding and eBird even more fun in 2019.
Monthly Archives: December 2018
2019 Checklist-a-day Challenge
In 2018, eBird received more than 6.5 million complete checklists from your birding efforts. Whether you’re seeing starlings or endangered species, eBird thrives on the enthusiasm and engagement of tens of thousands of dedicated participants worldwide who reliably enter their birding outings in eBird. Our most committed eBirders go a step beyond, putting in checklists from short yard counts, lunchtime walks, or a quick stop to scan their favorite local patch. Our challenge to you in 2019 is to see if you can submit an average of at least one checklist a day—for the entire year. At the end of the year three winners will be chosen from among those who submitted at least 365 eligible checklists in 2019, and will receive Zeiss binoculars for their efforts. Read more below.
Tyler Arboretum Bird Walk
January 2 @ 8:15 AM
Tyler Arboretum
515 Painter Road, Media, PA 19063
Phone: 610-566-9134
Tyler is a wonderful winter haven for non-migratory birds.
Explore Tyler’s winter landscapes with experienced birders who
know all the best places to look. Birders of all experience levels welcome.
Bring bird guides and binoculars if you have them. Meet at the
Visitor Center
https://www.tylerarboretum.org/events/winter-bird-walks/2019-01-02/
The Future of Birds in Our National Parks
As our climate changes, the bird species we see in our national parks will change, too.
How Well Do We Really Know Cardinals?
New research provides support for splitting the Northern Cardinal into multiple species.
https://www.audubon.org/news/how-well-do-we-really-know-cardinals
eBird 2018–Year in review
Sixteen years ago, we embarked on a grand experiment: using the web to connect birdwatchers around the world in a way that informs research and conservation. With every year that goes by, we’re humbled and awed by the passion and drive of the community that continues to power this experiment. There are now more than 420,000 eBirders who have contributed the sightings from out your window, on the way to work, or from your leisure-time visits to parks, ponds, and fields. You have collected more than 590 million bird observations, continuing to make eBird the world’s largest biodiversity-related citizen science project. Importantly, everything that you do makes a difference for the birds that we care about: helping inspire the millions of people each year who come to eBird to learn; assisting the tens of thousands of people who use eBird data every year for research, conservation, and education; and informing work that helps the birds themselves.
Senate Votes to Protect Additional 17,000 Acres of U.S. Coastline
(NEW YORK, December 20, 2018) “This is good news for both people and birds who live along the coasts because between rising seas and saturating hurricanes, the best answer right now is not concrete walls and sandbags, it’s naturally resilient coasts,” said David Yarnold, President and CEO of National Audubon Society (@david_yarnold). “Since it was signed into law by President Reagan in 1982, the Coastal Barrier Resources Act has kept more than 3 million acres of flood- and storm-prone shoreline natural, buffering nearby communities and shielding taxpayers from the costs of recovery and redevelopment. It is gratifying to see Congress giving this commonsense program the upgrades it needs.”
White House Ramps Up Plan to Drill in The Arctic Refuge; Audubon Calls It “Inexplicable”
(Washington, D.C. – December 20, 2018) On the eve of the one-year anniversary of the tax act that opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, The Bureau of Land Management released its draft environmental impact statement (EIS) in preparation for an oil and gas lease sale in 2019 within the ecologically sensitive coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, America’s premier wilderness refuge. This is the latest move by the administration in a rushed process to allow drilling in one of the nation’s most remote and iconic landscapes.
How Do Birds Survive The Winter?
It seems logical that most birds flee the northern regions to overwinter somewhere warmer, such as the tropics. Their feat of leaving their homes, navigating and negotiating often stupendous distances twice a year, indicates their great necessity of avoiding the alternative—of staying and enduring howling snowstorms and subzero temperatures.
A Mexican Hawk in Maine Has Somehow Survived Two Snowstorms
Hundreds of people have visited the first wild Great Black Hawk to venture into the United States, where it’s dining on squirrel instead of lizard.
https://www.audubon.org/news/a-mexican-hawk-maine-has-somehow-survived-two-snowstorms