As I mentioned in an earlier post, the boys and I do love our lists! We decided to post some of our birding lists online, where they will be easy to find for us and anyone else who might be interested.
To start with I’ve posted some of our most recent lists of neighborhood birds — the lists we generate on a daily, monthly, or seasonal basis. These include:
- eBird Data for our block in south Oak Park
- Our eBird Data for Columbus Park, Chicago
- Our eBird Data for south Oak Park
- Our FeederWatch data for 2008-2009
The permanent links to the pages are on the right column of the Neighborhood Nature blog home page. These data pages will change often as we collect more observations. We will also post some examples of our year lists and life lists within the next week or so.
Why make lists?
When the kids were younger they collected stuff: Plastic turtles, toy cars, bugs, wooden trains, rocks and fossils, and more. (Here’s a link to an article in which I described the earliest stages of the boys collecting days, entitled Aaron’s Treasures.) Now we collect names of birds, which are much easier to store and sort through, but harder to play with or display in attractive ways. But, for us, these lists record interesting stories and good memories about the birds we’ve encountered.
Also, the lists that I posted today are organized and stored online using the FeederWatch and eBird websites, so they are data available for scientists and land managers to study. Maybe somebody gets play with these lists after all.
Neighborhood Nature 