Remember, the threshold for quad completion is only ten hours for the Summer Bird Atlas. These ten hours should be primarily in the morning when most birds are singing. Save the aquatic areas for later in the day when birds are less vocal.

Most importantly, we want you to get out there and enjoy yourself.

Good luck and be safe.

Bayou Birding Bon Temps Takes Flight

This Spring you will have one more reason to get out and go birding. The Louisiana Bird Resource Center, the Louisiana Office of Tourism and partners are promoting the Louisiana Birding Trails with a 10-day birding event during the peak of migration.

The Bayou Birding Bon Temps offers several ways for participants to get involved including birding single or multiple sites for one or several days. The event is designed to develop checklists for the birding sites across the state. To accomplish this goal, all data will be entered through eBird. By now, most Louisiana birders are familiar with the popular data entry portal. There is no charge for participation, simply choose a birding trail site, Wildlife Management Area, or National Widlife Refuge to visit, record the species and number of birds during your visit and enter the data to eBird. It's that simple. Come on out and pass a good time!
Go here to learn how you can get involved.





Winter Bird Atlas: Third Year Begins January 10th

With Christmas Bird Counts completed and birders primed, the third year of the Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas begins January 10th. We welcome back all the hard-working volunteers that have put so much energy into the atlas. We are truly inspired by the quality and dedication of Louisiana birders.

New to the atlas and want to get involved? You can check out the project description and instructions at the Louisiana Bird Resource Center website by visiting the atlas web pages here.

The short story is this: if you can identify Louisiana birds -even if they're just the neighborhood birds- you can help us document the distribution and abundance of wintering birds in Louisiana.

Come on out, winter's great!


Summer Atlas Underway (June 2008)

Here we go! After a successful pilot season in 2007, the Louisiana Summer Bird Atlas shifts into high gear. We hope you’re as excited as we are to get out there and explore. The pilot season produced all kinds of exciting finds: Piping Plover, Greater Roadrunner, Western Kingbird, Willow Flycatcher, …who knows what we might find this year? Most importantly, we’re getting relative abundance data for our summer birds, which will be used to publish the Louisiana Summer Bird Atlas in 2010. This will be a valuable tool for biologists, conservationists, and land managers well into the future.

Remember, the threshold for quad completion is only ten hours for the Summer Bird Atlas rather than twenty for the Winter Bird Atlas. These ten hours should be primarily in the morning when most birds are singing. Save the aquatic areas for later in the day when birds are less vocal.

There is one minor change for the remainder of the atlas and it can be summed up with the eBird slogan: think globally, bird locally. With rising fuel prices and the emphasis on morning hours, we’re dropping the priority quad scheme. This means you can save the fuel and time it would take to leapfrog quads. We still hope you will consider birding an hour or two if your travels take you to different parts of the state. Most importantly though, we want you to get out there and have fun birding and don’t want to discourage anyone from birding in any particular quad.

Good luck and be safe. We look forward to seeing the data!

Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas: Year Two Starts January 10 (December 2007)

The Christmas Bird Count season is here and soon thereafter we'll kickoff the second year of the Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas. This is a big success due to the great birders that participated in the inaugural season. This year will be even more interesting with the first year of comparative data.

The project gained the attention of quantitative ecologist Van Savage. He gave a presentation at Louisiana State University as part of a job interview and communicated during his presentation that this was just the kind of data set he was interested in working with because its the first atlas with seasonal and abundance data. The possibilities for analysing the data to further our understanding and develop management strategies of Louisiana's birds is very encouraging.

Now that the core group of observers is up to speed on data entry, we hope everyone will help us recruit additional volunteers and help get them started. To make it even easier, we are lowering the minimal number of hours requirred for each quadrangle to ten hours. This doesn't mean we don't want your data from your favorite quad; on the contrary, ten more hours in a quad that was done last year would provide great data. The motivation for lowering the hour threshold was to encourage wider coverage. We would like volunteers to pick a second or third quad further afield to get better statewide coverage.

We look forward to seeing you in the field and the data in the eBird database.

For further information on the Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas, please contact Richard Gibbons at rgibbo3[at]lsu.edu.


Six Important Bird Areas Designated in Louisiana (May 2007)

In April 2007, the Louisiana Important Bird Areas Program formally identified its first six IBAs. The 630,000 acres, or 986 square miles, of habitat encompass critical breeding, wintering, and stopover habitat for birds of conservation concern such as the endangered Piping Plover and Red-cockaded Woodpecker, the near-threatened Bachman's and Henslow's Sparrow, American Woodcock, Northern Bobwhite, congregatory Northern Pintail, Ring-necked Duck, Canvasback, Royal and Sandwich Tern, and significant populations of Prothonotary, Yellow-throated, and Northern Parula Warbler.

The selected sites in Louisiana represent a range of habitats that include upland pine savannahs, forested wetlands, barrier islands, and bald cypress-tupelo swamps. Louisiana has four Bird Conservation Regions with fairly large contiguous areas of habitat. It is expected that some IBAs will be small sites standing out in a more developed landscape, but many sites will be larger, landscape-level areas.

Winter Bird Atlas Completes First Season (April 2007)

The Louisiana Winter Atlas completed its first seson March 20th. We didn't know what to expect with only an idea and a plan. We were overwhelmed with the effort made by Louisiana birders.

The success of the inaugural season of the Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas is perhaps best measured by taking a look at the numbers. For a six week sampling window, the following effort was recorded:

1292 - volunteer hours
152 - survey units sampled of nearly 400
15 - eBird rank for states contributing records (previously near the bottom)

This was a hoot for us and for many of the volunteers. The stories are still rolling in and there are some outstanding records as well. Of course, the everyday records are the bread and butter of the survey and our partnership with eBird helped keep our starry-eyed birders on task keeping numbers for the common birds.

This was so much fun...we've decided to do a Summer Bird Atlas. No kidding. It will not be this Summer as we need to retool and regroup, but it will be up and ready to go for Summer 2008. This will provide a needed update to the decade-old Breeding Bird Atlas with the major modification being presence/absence and numbers rather than presence/absence and a level of breeding. We'll try to work as many fields into the application as is practical and possible.

We have submitted a proposal to the Louisiana State Wildlife Grants Program for technician funding. Even with all the volunteer effort, we still need hired technicians to survey the remote areas far away from populated and heavily birded areas.

To our partners, supporters, and volunteers, a big thank you. Louisiana should be proud to have such a dedicated group of citizen-scientists that prefer to do rather than do nothing.

We will do our part to make sure the data is compiled, analyzed, and made available.



Winter Bird Atlas Underway! (January 2007)

Louisiana birders are making history as they take part in the first Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas. Sure, there are rarities being found: Harris's Sparrow, Western Kingbirds, Painted Buntings, and Long-tailed Ducks, but the real prize is getting relative abundance estimates for birds spending the winter in the mild marshes, bottomlands, and pine/oak woodlands of Louisiana. We are in the second week of the atlas and momentum is building. Bird clubs and individuals across the state are contributing their data to the Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas and to the eBird database which provides valuable data for today and tomorrow.

Purple Finch found by Bob and Karen Pierson

Come on, pick a quad and be a part of history.

3x5 Cards Go Digital (December 2006)

No longer will you have to stay awake at night torturing yourself about not turning in your outstanding bird finds. It just got a lot easier to submit records. There are more than 50,000 records in the old library card catolog system and this data makes up the bulk of what we know about Louisiana birds. We hope now by lowering the participation threshold, our knowledge of Louisiana birds will be brought into an even sharper focus. We hope you will give it a try.


Winter Bird Atlas Gearing Up (December 2006)

As winter birds settle in to habitats across Louisiana, the bird center is preparing to launch the first Louisiana Winter Bird Atlas. It's an exciting project with a twist on traditional atlasing efforts. We want numbers! That's right, numbers to go along with those identified birds and that's not all. We're combining Christmas Bird Count methodology with breeding bird atlas survey units to produce a winter bird atlas with abundance classes for each species. To do that, we need distance covered and by what means. Starting to sound complicated? Don't worry, we're making it easy for you to bird with purpose.

eBird
We've partnered with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society to allow online data entry, review, and retrieval using the increasingly popular eBird. Your birding efforts are not only contributing to Louisiana knowledge, but also to a database that will answer questions at the continental and intercontinental scale.

It's easy to get started. Explore the Winter Atlas pages to learn more.


Melanie Driscoll Hired to Lead IBA Program (February 2006)

We welcome Melanie Driscoll as she takes the reigns of the Louisiana IBA Program. Melanie brings years of experience from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology where she worked with the House Finch Program.

Melanie has an ambitious plan and the organizational skills to make it reality. We hope you will help in the process of identifying the areas most important for Louisiana birdlife.


Bird Center Hires Coordinator (September 2005)

The Louisiana Bird Resource Center hired Richard Gibbons to coordinate the center efforts.

His educational background includes a Bachelor’s degree from Centenary College of Louisiana and a Master’s degree in Biology from Texas A&M–Corpus Christi. For his Master’s project he investigated the wintering abundance and habitat preferences of seven species of surface-diving waterbirds in a Texas estuary.

Richard has worked as a field biologist for the past ten years in various parts of the Americas on projects investigating avian productivity and survivorship, hawk migration, Andean hummingbirds, and Texas colonial waterbirds.