eBird perks and processes

By summer, young black-crowned night-herons from the Holliday Park colony are fishing along the edge of the lake. Photo by Mark Gorges.

Birders get look behind the scenes, find more eBird perks

Published March 3, 2023, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

By Barb Gorges

            eBird has come a long way since its debut in 2002.

            As a means of collecting scientific bird data by offering birders a place to save their bird lists, Cornell Lab of Ornithology invented an ingenious bit of community (or citizen) science and it just keeps getting better.

            Anyone can go to eBird.org and sign up for free. The website, under the Help tab, has tutorials on how to enter your bird sightings.

            Don Jones, University of Wyoming graduate student studying sagebrush songbirds, and Cheyenne Audubon’s February guest speaker, said that for Wyoming, 15,000 different birdwatchers have submitted 200,000 checklists so far. Wyoming eBird data was recently added to the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database.

            Globally, as of the 20^th anniversary in May 2022, 820,000 eBirders contributed 1.3 billion observations.

            Since scientists are expected to use eBird data, there is a review process. Once, I received a polite email from the regional reviewer asking if I had indeed seen 49 black-crowned night-herons at Holliday Park, and if so, could I send more information.

            When I explained that it was a breeding colony that has been there for years (and is still there, but a bit diminished as the park loses the big cottonwoods), my report was accepted. Today, I can look up that night-heron sighting on eBird and tell you it started May 29 at 7:45 a.m. and I saw 220 birds of 15 species while walking 1.5 miles in an hour.

            Don, a volunteer eBird reviewer for 10 years, explained that if the reviewer doesn’t think you have enough information to verify the entry, the entry can stay on your list but it won’t be publicly available. Don’s been in that boat, especially when birding abroad when he’s discovered he’s made identification mistakes. But then he was able to fix them.

            The globe is divided into review areas. We are in the Laramie/Goshen counties area. Volunteer reviewers familiar with the bird life here, like Don, set a filter for each species specifying which months it might be seen and maximum number seen at one time. The number is higher for a migratory species during migration months than during breeding months when birds spread out and become secretive.

            Filters do change over time. Perhaps an invasive species like the Eurasian collared-dove has moved in or another species, like the dickcissel, is becoming rarer.

            In the last few years, eBird has added new perks for birdwatchers. One is signing up for notices for birds you’d like to see.

            For instance, I can generate a list of species I haven’t seen in Laramie County but others have – target species. My 87 target species seem to be a lot of rarities – species unlikely to be seen here, but maybe common elsewhere. For instance, eBird has only three reports of prairie warbler, an eastern species, in Cheyenne, in 2000 and 2001. I have a much better chance of finding native burrowing owls last reported in 2022.

            Once you know what birds you want to see, you can sign up for alerts. There are two kinds. Rare Bird Alerts are for species the American Birding Association considers rare for your area of interest. If I sign up for Needs Alerts for Laramie County, I’ll be alerted whenever someone reports a species I haven’t seen here yet.

            Note: When eBird says “Laramie,” they mean our county, not our neighboring town to the west.   

            eBird is handy for preparing for a birding trip to an area you aren’t familiar with by showing where publicly accessible hotspots are and generating a list of species for you. You can see the latest observations.

            You can even generate a multiple-choice species identification quiz for a location at a particular time of year, either with photos or bird sounds.

            After your trip, you can pull together all the checklists you submitted and add notes and photos to make a “Trip Report” to save and share.

            Under the Science tab are all sorts of wonderous interpretations of eBird data: Visualizations of bird abundance, abundance trends, migratory route animations plus improved range maps showing breeding, wintering and migration areas for each species.

            There’s the list of published studies using eBird data. There were 160 peer-reviewed publications in 2022, like this one: “Bai, J., P. Hou, D. Jin, J. Zhai, Y. Ma, and J. Zhao (2022) “Habitat Suitability Assessment of Black-Necked Crane (Grus nigricollis) in the Zoige Grassland Wetland Ecological Function Zone on the Eastern Tibetan Plateau.” Diversity 14(7).”

            It’s incredible to think we birdwatchers, while having fun watching birds all over the world, with just a little extra effort, maybe using the mobile app, can contribute knowledge that helps birds.

            For questions about eBird in Wyoming, contact Don Jones through the University of Wyoming online directory.

Burrowing owls materialize

Greg Johnson took this photo of a Burrowing Owl June 16, 2018, on the Cheyenne – High Plains Audubon Society field trip around southeastern Wyoming.

“Burrowing owls materialize on southeast Wyoming grasslands,” published July 29, 2018 in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle and at Wyoming Network News, https://www.wyomingnetworknews.com/burrowing-owls-materialize-on-southeast-wyoming-grasslands.

Burrowing owls materialize on southeast Wyoming grasslands

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By Barb Gorges

Burrowing owls were like avian unicorns for me until this spring. Mark, my husband, and I searched prairie dog towns in southeastern Wyoming to no avail.

It wasn’t always like that. Fifteen years ago there was a spot on the east edge of Cheyenne guaranteed to produce a sighting for the Cheyenne Audubon Big Day Bird Count. But the area around it got more and more built up.

I did some research through my subscription to Birds of North America, https://birdsna.org and discovered burrowing owls don’t require complete wilderness.

These owls are diurnal—they are active during the day, most active at dawn and dusk. However, when the males have young to feed, they hunt 24/7.

The eggs are laid in old animal burrows, primarily those of prairie dogs. Because prairie dogs live in colonies, the burrowing owls tend to appear in groups, too, though much smaller. Besides nesting burrows, they have roosting burrows for protection from predators. They stockpile prey in both kinds of burrows in anticipation of feeding young. One cache described in a Saskatchewan study had 210 meadow voles and two deer mice.

Western burrowing owls, from southwestern Canada to southwestern U.S., winter in Central and South America. However, there are year-round populations in parts of California, southernmost Arizona and New Mexico and western Texas and on south. But there is also a subspecies of the owl that lives in Florida and the Caribbean year-round. They excavate their own burrows.

Burrowing owls breed in the open, treeless grasslands. No one is sure why, but they like to line their nesting burrows with dung from livestock. They, along with their prairie dog neighbors, appreciate how grazing animals keep the grass short. It’s easier to see approaching predators.

The owls’ biggest natural nest predator is the badger. Both young and adults can scare predators away from their burrows by giving a call that imitates a rattlesnake’s rattle.

Short grass means it’s easier to catch prey by walking or hopping on the ground as well as flying. Burrowing owls also like being near agricultural fields.

The fields attract their primary prey species: grasshoppers, crickets, moths, beetles, and in addition to small mammals like mice and voles, shrews.

You would think these owls are ranchers’ and farmers’ best friends. However, in the Birds of North America’s human impacts list are wind turbines, barbed wire, vehicle collisions, pesticides and shooting. I’m surprised by shooting.

Since western burrowing owls can’t be blamed for making the holes in pastures (they only renovate and maintain burrows by kicking out dirt) I can only surmise that varmint hunters have bad eyesight and can’t tell an owl from a prairie dog. It could be an easy mistake: Owls are nearly the color and size of prairie dogs and have similar round heads. Except the owls stand on long skinny legs. From a distance the owls look like prairie dogs hovering over the burrow’s mound—and then if you watch long enough, they fly.

Burrowing owls have been in sharp decline since the 1960s despite laying 6 to 12 eggs per nest. The Burrowing Owl Conservation Network, http://burrowingowlconservation.org, reports the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists them as “a Bird of Conservation Concern at the national level, in three USFWS regions, and in nine Bird Conservation Regions. At the state level, burrowing owls are listed as endangered in Minnesota, threatened in Colorado, and as a species of concern in Arizona, California, Florida, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.”

In our state, Grant Frost, Wyoming Game and Fish Department wildlife biologist, said “(burrowing owls) are what we classify as a species of greatest conservation need (SGCN), but mostly due to a lack of information; their status is unknown.  That is why these surveys were started three years ago.  There are 15 surveys being done throughout the state in potential habitat…each survey route is done three times each year during set times to occur during each of the three nesting stages – pre-incubation, incubation/hatching, and nestling.”

When Grant said he could lead an Audubon field trip to see the owls and other prairie birds, 15 of us jumped at the chance.

As might be predicted from the BNA summary of the literature, the owls were in the middle of an agricultural setting of fields and pastures. We watched them hunt around a flock of sheep and enjoy the view from the tops of fence posts along an irrigation canal.

The first sightings of the morning were distant—hard to see even with a spotting scope. But as we departed for home, driving a little farther down the road, two burrowing owls appeared much closer and we all felt finally that we could say we’d seen them and not just flying brown smudges.