Birdwatching at the Bay!
After my successful birdwatching outing on Wednesday, I thought I would try something different today.
This is all quite fabulous.
When you say eBird considered several of the species infrequent, I believe you’re talking about the feature where it puts little colored circles next to the bird’s name when you’re entering it in your checklist in the app. I use the IOS app, not the Android version of the app that I believe you’re using, but my guess is that feature is the same on both platforms. And yes, that’s based on eBird submissions from the surrounding area. I’m not sure how big the area it uses is, but it makes sense that shoreline-specific species might show up as infrequent based on their only being reported on lists from the shore, and having their incidence diluted, so to speak, from all the non-shoreline lists being submitted nearby that don’t have them. But that’s cool! Congrats on “leveling up” to infrequent birds! 🙂
The other thing that will probably happen to you at some point is you’ll trip one of the “filters”, which are manually curated settings created by the local volunteer eBird reviewers to flag observations that are unusual enough that they are automatically routed to the reviewer queue for evaluation. That happens if you report a particularly rare bird, or if your count of a species is high enough that it looks unusual. That will prompt you in the app to provide more details to help the reviewers decide whether to officially “confirm” the observation or not. You shouldn’t be worried if that happens; the process is all very low-key and friendly and respectful, and even if the reviewers end up deciding the evidence isn’t sufficient to confirm the sighting it will still be there in your view of your list. It just won’t show up in searches for that species, or in the official data products that researchers get from eBird.
The folks you saw with a spotting scope: yeah, that’s a popular tool for shorebirds and waterfowl in particular. Since you’re looking at birds that are far away and not moving around too much, a scope on a tripod is super helpful. They typically have magnifications that start at 15x or 20x and can go up higher from there, and you get an amazing view that is way better than handheld 7x or 8x binoculars. But they’re a pain to haul around, and good ones are expensive, so you tend to see them only being used by fairly obsessive types, and then again, only when conditions favor their use. Once we get out of the pandemic you might think about trying to attend a local Audubon chapter or birdwatching club’s outing; usually the leader of such trips will bring a scope and share views with the participants (again, pre-pandemic; these days scope-sharing with people not in your bubble is very much frowned upon). I still remember the first time I looked through a leader’s scope at a bird (it was a woodpecker). I was 12 at the time, and it totally rocked my world. “I’ve got to get me one of these,” I remember thinking, and a couple of Christmas/birthdays later I’d saved up enough to do just that.
I’m so glad you got to see the Anna’s Hummingbird display flight. Indeed spectacular! If you get lucky you might also see the Allen’s Hummingbird version of that: instead of super-high “J” shape with a chirp at the bottom it’s a shallow “U” with an adorable tail-waggle at the end. Birds are amazing.
Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/646185984429522944.
