Join the ‘e-Bird World’

Do you want to do your own research about where the birds are and where they aren’t? A revolutionary interactive program called "eBird" gives you access to a huge data base of bird data and lore.

Better yet, eBird lets you yourself become part of and contribute to the knowledge base about birds in North America.

A real-time, online checklist program, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community reports and accesses information about birds. Launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, eBird provides rich data sources for basic information on bird abundance and distribution.

The program can be accessed at http://ebird.org. There is a special Vermont "portal" for eBird that is managed by the Vermont Institute of Natural Science (VINS) in Quechee. You can go directly to that site at http://ebird.org/content/vins.

eBird’s goal is to make it easy to access of the vast numbers of bird observations made each year by recreational and professional bird watchers. It is amassing one of the largest and fastest-growing biodiversity data resources in existence. For example, in 2006, participants reported more than 4.3 million bird observations across North America.

eBird’s website alows participants to visulaize the birding data with interactive maps, graphs, and bar charts. The observations of each participant join those of others in an international network of eBird users.

eBird then shares these observations with a global community of educators, land managers, ornithologists, and conservation biologists. In time these data will become the foundation for a better understanding of bird distribution across the western hemisphere and beyond, the Cornell Lab believes.