EricB

Mouth watering stuff.Thanks for sharing these great birds.
Perhaps this is a good thread to introduce 'e Bird' to those of you who haven't come across it.
It's a project run by Cornell University and I think it is  a great tool for centralising those records that are not submitted to a local society formally.
Mainly I upload data from my foreign trips , which would otherwise be confined to my abandoned bird programmes and old diaries.
On a recent US trip I found it very helpful in working out was seen in the local area within the last 30 days.
I would encourage data from a trip like your recent one to be entered on this site.
http://ebird.org/content/ebird/about
With kind regards,
E

[ Last edited by EricB at 28/07/2011 06:57 ]

EricB

Thanks for that Mike.I used this platform to open the concept of eBird, and its ability to really amalgamate the data from visiting birders to any country in the world.My experience of submitting entries to Birding organisations, is that I tend to send in a report of something interesting but exclude what I might consider to be 'ordinary'. e Bird , over the years will be a real handle on trends in bird populations over time and can also be usefully employed for historical records.
Perhaps they can in the future help with birding across country boundaries and even help lobby on conservation issues based on the sheer weight of the number of people who are actively interested.
Most of these electronic bird data sites in the Uk and the US feed data to the local bird groups(county/state & national level)- this means you only have to enter your data once. I am unsure how Cornell work with local groups outside the US but an electronic data base like e Bird is clearly going to increase the quantity and probably the quality of the data that is being presented for long term population trends.Their aim to look at birds sightings related to small pockets of habitat will eventually allow them to preform calculations to support what we all already know- habitat destruction is directly linked to decreasing bird populations.I hope they may be able to give us an early warning system to minimise the loss in bird numbers.
With kind regards,
Eric