President’s Column
Redwood Region Audubon Society:
Listing for Science?
April 2006
Have you ever gotten a sneer from someone when you mention, “I really need that bird for my (fill-in-the-blank) list!” There seems to be a common perception that listing (actively keeping a bird checklist) is a bad behavior that only some birders engage in. Certainly, some listers show the stereotypical trait of the self-absorbed “twitcher” who glimpses a bird and then checks the name off his or her list. But listing has benefits too. When I first started birding, I found that by keeping county lists, I was motivated to travel to every corner of the state to find birds. My identification skills got much better, and I learned the distribution of birds by starting my list from scratch at every county line. And when I “chased” a rare bird, I had to learn the field marks of the target bird and those of the other birds I had to sift through to find the rarity. Not only has listing improved my birding skills but it’s also made it more enjoyable by rewarding me with a tick mark even for those common birds.
Once I have a basic list of species observed, the next step is to turn them into a conservation tool by using my field notes. With only minimal effort, I can add to my list the date, location, effort (hours birding and number of persons), and estimates of the number of individual birds. I then need to archive my lists, but this process has become simpler and more fun to do with Cornell Laboratory’s eBird website (www.eBird.org). This free web-based checklist program lets me archive my lists while also making the data available to scientists, birders, and other conservationists. With thousands of records from listers like me, researchers can examine migration patterns, invasive species expansions, and many other pressing issues. So the next time I get a sneer from someone, I can say, “Oh, I really need that bird for science!”