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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 has also gained the attention of quantitative ecologist Van Savage. He gave a presentation at Louisiana State University as part of a job interview and included the bird atlas in his presentation as 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.
Winter Bird Atlas Underway! (January 2006)
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.
Come on! Pick a quad, bird to your heart's content, 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. |
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