Category Archives: Birding Records

Birdseye BirdLog App Now $.99 — Get It

In conjunction with Great Backyard Bird Count, the wonderful app BirdLog is available for $.99 for a limited time.  I paid $9.99 and think it was worth every penny — you may recall I raved about it here.  How can you miss for less than a dollar?

BirdLog lets you tally birds as you move along on a birding outing and submit the report as soon as you are done.  In the frigid weather we’ve been having, I often wait until I get my fingers thawed out in the truck.  One thing I like is the easy way to put in a personal hotspot — if you have 3G, the GPS lists your location and you can just change the name to one that you like, and voila — it’s ready for eBird.  I often go home and edit the eBird report, adding photos.

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I use BirdLog on my iPhone but they have an Android version as well.  This offer lasts only until February 18th.  Check it out — it’s quite a bargain.

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Christmas Bird Count Coming in Two Weeks

Christmas Bird Count participants on the Northhampton, MA count. Photo by Geoff LeBaron.

With this winter’s influx of winter finches and other northern visitors, birders throughout the Northeast have been saying, “I hope that bird stays around for the Christmas Bird Count!”  You never know what you are going to find in late December birding but “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” among Vermont Birders for a Northern Hawk Owl or a Varied Thrush.  The annual bird count starts in just two weeks.

The Christmas Bird Count came about as a reaction to slaughter.  During the late 1800’s, there was a popular holiday tradition known as the Christmas “Side Hunt, a  killing binge in which Americans went merrily into the woods to compete in shooting as many birds and small animals as they could within the holiday. People chose sides and went afield with their guns; whoever brought in the biggest pile of feathered (and furred) quarry won.

This was a time when conservation was in its beginning stages  and many observers and scientists were becoming concerned about declining bird populations. Beginning on Christmas Day 1900, ornithologist Frank Chapman, an early officer in the then budding Audubon Society, proposed a new holiday tradition-a “Christmas Bird Census”- that would count birds in the holidays rather than hunt them.

So began the Christmas Bird Count. Thanks to the inspiration of Frank M. Chapman and the enthusiasm of twenty-seven dedicated birders, twenty-five Christmas Bird Counts were held that day. The locations ranged from Toronto, Ontario to Pacific Grove, California with most counts in or near the population centers of northeastern North America. Those original 27 Christmas Bird Counters tallied around 90 species on all the counts combined.

The 113th annual Christmas Bird Count involves tens of thousands of participants.  This year’s  count will take place between Dec 14, 2012 to January 5, 2013.  It is the longest running Citizen Science survey in the world, providing critical data on population trends.   Volunteers will be out across the nation and hemisphere bagging more than 50 million birds by eyeball.

Each count occurs in a designated circle, 15 miles in diameter, and is led by an experienced birder, or designated “compiler”.

One of the “hoped for” birds for Vermont counters is the Bohemian Waxwing. photo ©Brook Lundquist

While there is a specific methodology to the CBC and you need to count birds within an existing Christmas Bird Count circle, everyone can participate! If you are a beginning birder, you will be able to join a group that includes at least one experienced birdwatcher. If your home is within the boundaries of a Christmas Bird Count circle, then you can stay home and report the birds that visit your feeder or join a group of birdwatchers in the field. If you have never been on a CBC before and you want to participate in a count this year, including feeder counting, please contact your count compiler prior to the count.

Click here to learn where Vermont CBCs are located, date of counts and compiler contact information.  I plan to participate in the Plainfield CBC on December 15th.

Alpha Codes are easier than I thought

Last month, I wrote a blog post about using BirdLog to track my sightings in the field and enter them right into eBird.  I love it and use it often.  However, it really helps to use Bird Codes to identify birds — saves a lot of typing and guessing.  So I decided to learn more about bird codes — those weird ACRONYMS that serious birders seem to effortlessly roll off their tongues.  I always thought folks were showing off until I learned the ease and the facility of using them.

Alpha codes are 4-letter shorthand abbreviations for bird species. These codes are commonly used in field notes to quickly record and submit sightings (i.e. eBird.org) and other situations where writing down the entire species name is impractical.  The rules are pretty simple:

1.  If the name is one word, the code is the first four letters.  Mallard for example is MALL or Dickcissel is DICK.

Mallards — MALL– Upper Artichoke Reservoir, West Newbury, MA October 22, 2012.

2.  Also simple are birds with 2-word names. Just take the first two letters of each word. Winter Wren = WIWR, American Goldfinch = AMGO.

Northern Cardinal – NOCA – Harrison Bay State Park, TN January 16, 2012

3.  Birds with 3-word names get more complicated; if there is a hyphen between two words take one letter from each of the hyphenated words, and two letters from the other word.  Eastern Screech-Owl = EASO.

White-crowned Sparrow – WCSP – Goose Island State Park, TX    January 30, 2012

4.  If the name has four parts, either separate words or hyphenated parts, the code is the first letter of each part.  Black-crowned Night Heron = BCNH.

Black-crowned Night Heron – BCNH – Goose Island State Park, TX February 15, 2012

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images by Dick Mansfield

Logging Birds on my Smartphone

After a number of tries at using Birdwatcher’s Diary, I dumped it and switched to BirdLog which is developed by the folks who developed BirdsEye which is one of my favorite apps on my iPhone.  I found Birdwatcher’s Diary very tricky to use, even though I’m pretty “geeky” and read the instructions.  It was too frustrating for me and I just swallowed the $12.95 and moved on.

I’ve been using BirdLog for about a month — not on every outing but ten times so far.  Even though we have no cell coverage in our woods, it works offline and I can upload an eBird report when I get home.  It seems like I’m always trying to find a pen, or the bird notebook currently being used, but my iPhone is always on me when I’m ready to go.

If you know eBird, it’s easy to use.  First you set up an outing and it automatically grabs the start time (or you can modify it) and uses any hotspots or personal sites you already have.  You can use the smartphone GPS to define a new birding spot.

    

It loads the database for your area and off you go, tapping to select the bird and the count.  If you see 19 American Crows, in they go and off you go to look for other species.  My bird counts are more accurate since you enter them as you see them — and add more if you see more later.

   

I’m not too good, yet, at bird codes although I also have an app for looking those up.  It’s called Nemesis Code and only costs $.99.  However, in reading the background for the codes, I find that they are easier to determine than I expected.  It’s the fastest way to select the bird you’ve seen.

I do run into some problems when I’m just birding and not using the apps — it sometimes reverts back to the entry page (although my ongoing report is saved and easy to recall).  It’s easy to spend too much time with you eyes on the screen rather than the trees — but that’s the same problem you can have with notepads and errant pens.

Probably the neatest aspect of Birdlog is that you don’t have to “reconstruct” reports for entering into eBird when you get home — you just let them fly when you’re done.  If you are going to four more sites that day, it’s easy to track and submit for each location — rather than trying to decipher notes later on.  The app for the iPhone is $9.99 in the iTunes App Store.  There’s also an Android app.