hallnatec's Journal

Work your patches, know where to find the birds within those patches, where they nest, when they arrive and depart, and know when something is different. Know the habitat and how it changes over time. Work your patches!

That is mantra I had in mind when I decided that I was going to adopt of all of the eBird Hotspots in my 5-mile radius patch. I had noticed, when researching areas to bird within my patch, that there were two Hotspots with 1 checklist and less than 15 species and another 16 Hotspots with less than 50 species. This isn't even to mention the other great birding spots which aren't eBird Hotspots. I felt bad for these under birded spots. Why should they not get the attention of other more popular spots? What birds are hiding in those spots which were being missed by those of us at the popular spots?

The first thing I did was create a snapshot of the current situation of the Hotspots in my patch. I went through each one and, in a Google Sheet, ordered them by how many species had been eBirded at each one. I also am keeping track of the amount of checklists which each Hotspot has as well. The smallest was Ludlow St pond at 2 species while the highest was Gilsland Farm at 254. My initial thought is to start by getting every one of them up to 50 species. Once I get those initial 18 Hotspots up to 50 then I'll start to focus on getting the 46 Hotspots below 100 up to the 100 mark.

In addition to working these "orphaned" Hotspots, I have created a list of parks, land trusts, cemeteries, farms, and other potential Hotspots that I will start exploring with an eye to suggesting them as official Hotspots or at least adding them to my list of spots to start working.

Now each day when I go out the bird, if there isn't a rarity I'm chasing then I swing by the Hotspot at the bottom of the list with an eye towards getting it higher. So far, I've gotten the 2 lists under 15 up over the 15 mark and am working on getting the lowest ones up to the 50 mark.

Further, because I've been exploring new areas, I've found not only some new birding spots but also some fun birds. At the Ludlow St pond, I pished up two kind-of-late Orange-crowned Warblers and at a local high school football field, I had a flock of Evening Grosbeaks fly over. I'm curious to see what else I find in my new endeavor.

One of the birding blogs that I follow called I Used to Hate Birds is having a 2019 5MR challenge.

The details of the challenge can be found here. But basically they are asking people to bird an area with a 5 mile radius centered on your home. Each month they are asking you to figure out your percentage. To figure out your percentage you take the number of birds you saw in your area and divide it by the number of birds reported in your county on eBird.

For example, so far in December I've seen 33 species in my area while 125 species have been reported in Cumberland County. So my percentage would be 33/125= 26% for December.

It's green, local, and fun. Consider joining in.

I'll be posting my totals here as the year progresses.

For 2019 I'm participating in the 5-Mile Radius Challenge hosted by Jen Sanford of the I Used to Hate Birds blog. In preparation of the upcoming year, I have been doing a little bit of "paperwork" and data work.

First, I started by creating a Google Earth map of my 5MR. I then uploaded all of coordinates of my eBird Hotspots and got this lovely image. This was all a fairly easily process to do. Some quick Google searching and an Excel spreadsheet later everything was uploaded.

I had already created a Google doc which housed all of the eBird Hotspots in my 5MR with their species totals, and a total amount of completed checklists, but today I took that list and added which Hotspots were missing entries on their barcharts. (These charts represent how bird occurrence changes over the course of the year and are pulled directly from eBird data.) This allows me to prioritize based on which Hotspots have missing data and/or which have the lowest species counts. This will help me throughout the year as I attempt to eBird as much of my 5MR as possible while getting all the Hotspots up to at least 50 and filling in as much missing data as possible.

Here is a little glimpse of how I set my Google Sheet up.

The row coloring got messed up as I was sorting in different ways.