What do you know, I already had an account. Must have when I submitted a checklist to show the rate of bird recovery after those terrible brushfires in Victoria about ten tears ago.
Anyway, https://ebird.org/home
I like it, I wonder if there’s enough information in there yet to make videos of bird migration, and to make videos of range growth/shrinkage as a function of time. Hmm, videos of bird migration are available for up to 120 bird species are already available, but when I checked “whimbrel”, it only gave me the North American Distribution. Have to make your own outside North America.
For me, the main advantage is the ability to get reliable ranges for the most common 50% of bird species. In particular, for Australian birds commonly seen outside of Australia. It is so annoying that Australian bird books don’t show the range of Australian birds outside of Australia, that’s verging on the obscene.
For example, “ruddy turnstone” is a well known Australian bird, but the only place I’ve ever seen it is Jamaica.
For rarer birds, expert research is needed. But for common birds, nothing beats the shear volume of observations from hundreds of thousands of dedicated amateur observers taken weekly. “Bird sightings from eBirders cover 84% of the land surface of the globe” is a news article from 28 Oct 2019 based on https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.04632. Missing only central Africa, Siberia, and Antarctica, and a bit patchy in central Australia, the Amazon jungle, China and Indochina.
For Excel users, results are downloadable in a form suitable for Excel spreadsheets. Looking for that web link now. Dang it, I can find downloadable data for North America, but not for any other part of the world.
