5-Mile Radius Birding Patch
The 5-mile radius patch list. A patch, in birder terms, is basically a favorite birding area or site. I have a number of patch lists, including my yard, Evergreen Cemetery, Capisic Pond and Charles Jordan Road, to name a few. Usually (at least for me) they are a location fairly close to my house which I bird at regularly throughout the year.
A 5-mile patch list is a list of all the birds seen or heard within a 5-mile radius of your home. There are a number of reasons why I like this idea. First, it is contained yet covers enough space to offer some variety. In my case, because I live in Portland, ME I have habitat ranging from forested hills in Westbrook and Falmouth, to city oases of parks and cemeteries, to a couple islands of Casco Bay. Second, I was drawn to the low-carbon footprint of birding a 5-mile radius from your house. It is a struggle I have with birding which still doesn't sit well with me. I enjoy listing and even chasing but I also am aware of the environmental impact of the internal combustion engine. So focusing on a 5-mile radius helps to limit that impact, I hope.
The first step I took in creating my list was drawing a circle around my house. This tool allowed me to do just that. Here is my map. As I mentioned above there is a lot of good habitat within this circle.
Next I went to eBird and looked around to see what shared and personal hotspots I had in the area. There was a lot. In fact, it was a little overwhelming at first. I tried to create the patch from just looking at my locations and adding the ones I thought fit, but it was clear to me that wasn't going to work. So instead I downloaded all of my eBird data as a CSV file and went about the process of editing everything out what wasn't in my radius. I started by sorting by county (luckily my radius is in just one county) and deleting everything not in that county. I then sorted by hotspot and removed all the ones which I was sure didn't fit. Unfortunately, a recent life bird, a Painted Bunting, was just outside of my radius by probably 50 feet.
Next, I took out all of the multiple hits per location so my list was down to about 80 data points. Finally, with my map open in one screen and my hotspot list in the other I weeded it down to 58 hotspots. Note that is 58 spots out of 18,656 data points. At the time I made the list I ended up with 198 species and since that time have added two more to give me 200. With a wonderful Snowy Owl being the 200th bird.
Since having first written this I have added a number of patch birds to this patch, getting me up to 206.
Comments
That's a solid 5MR. Having so much coast is fantastic. I have no coastline in mine. I'm lucky enough to have some water along the American River. My 5MR is currently at 200 species but I think I am missing some pre-eBird rarities that I need to find some dates for.
Yeah, I really like it. In case you are curious here is the list of birds I've seen in it.
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