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to get started!<br><br>Cheers,< I'll third the sentiment. I'd also like to add that the data collected by eBird can be explored by the public. I've found this extraordinarily useful, especially when I'm visiting areas where I'm not familiar with what birds might be expected where. But on eBird's website it only takes me a few moments to pull up charts or maps that will show me exactly what species have been seen at what times of the year at what locations. This information, however, becomes a great deal more valuable with higher reporting rates. So, for example, if I pull up a bar chart for Cumberland County in Nova Scotia, there's enough information for me to get some sense of what species are likely to be seen at some point during the year. But there are lots of gaps, e.g., no records from the month of February. There would be little point in trying to narrow the location down even more or in restricting the year range -- there's just not enough data. But when I was birding around Ithaca, NY, the situation was completely different. Enough lists were submitted there that if I pulled up the chart for some birding spot (e.g., Stewart Park, so at a much more fine-grained level even than counties), I would likely see half a dozen or more submitted lists for just the prior week. That sort of up-to-date data leaves me with a great sense for what I might see when I head down to Stewart Park myself. Of course, this is less useful for those of us birding on our home stomping grounds. We already know what to expect. But it's fantastic for someone travelling who is trying to get to grips with a bewildering number of new species. The more lists we submit, the more useful eBird's data is for scientific purposes. But also the more useful it is for us amateur birdwatchers wanting to become better acquainted with the feathered diversity on our planet. Best wishes, Sydney P.S. To get a quick sense for what kind of information you can pull up, here's a bar chart of what's been reported for Halifax County in the last ten years: http://ebird.org/ebird/GuideMe?src=changeDate&getLocations=counties&counties=CA-NS-HL&parentState=CA-NS&reportType=location&monthRadio=on&bMonth=01&eMonth=12&bYear=2001&eYear=2010&continue.x=70&continue.y=11&continue=Continue And here's a map showing Boreal Chickadee sightings in NS for 2009-2010 (yellow markers indicate sightings in the last 30 days): http://ebird.org/ebird/GuideMe?src=changeDate&speciesCodes=borchi2&getLocations=states&states=CA-NS&parentState=CA-NS&reportType=species&monthRadio=on&bMonth=01&eMonth=12&bYear=2009&eYear=2010&continue.x=59&continue.y=16&continue=Continue
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