Hi everyone:
As we head into the second breeding season for the Maine Bird Atlas I'm going to begin posting weekly challenges, or targets, for everyone to look for while atlasing over the next seven days. This year, as an added incentive to try taking on some of these challenges, you have the chance to win Maine Bird Atlas gear (more details below)!
If you are new to the atlas, it is a project by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife that partners with Maine biologists and citizen scientists to documentation the distribution and relative abundance of all breeding and wintering birds across the entire state of Maine. You can learn more about the atlas, and find materials including the Volunteer Handbook here: maine.gov/birdatlas
A quick reminder: Please submit only eBird checklists that have at least one breeding code to the Maine Bird Atlas Portal (ebird.org/atlasme). All lists that do not have breeding codes should be entered to eBird (ebird.org) or the Maine eBird Portal (ebird.org/me).
Here are the challenges for this week:
Canada Goose - This species got great coverage in the first year with 227 blocks with confirmed breeding! Thanks to their long incubation periods and very detectable young (see species account below for more) they tend to be an easy species to confirm so your challenge this week is to find more geese! Use the breeding range map (ebird.org/atlasme/map/cangoo) to find areas with probable records that can be confirmed, or new blocks to be filled in.
American Crow - Another widely reported species from year one, crows are busy nest building right now and should be easy to spot carrying sticks around. Your goal is submit a confirmed record for this species.
Northern Cardinal - This is a tougher species to confirm, especially this early in the year, but the challenge this week is to submit any valid code with this species. Since we are in the "safe dates", all singing cardinals can be entered making this a fairly easy challenge for most people within their nesting range (and hopefully a good encouragement for people to fill in the gaps on their range map: ebird.org/atlasme/map/norcar)
To help you know what to look for, I've written species account to accompany these challenges. These are not comprehensive but should help identify some of the breeding behaviors that you are most likely to encounter for each species. The species accounts are available here: ebird.org/atlasme/about/species-profiles
About those incentives: Anyone who completes one of the challenges above will be entered to win any item of their choice (any product, style, color, size, etc) from the Maine Bird Atlas online store: teepublic.com/user/mainebirdatlas/. One entry per person per challenge (complete them all for 3x the chances of winning) from checklists submitted by 11:59PM on 17 May 2019.
Good birding and happy atlasing!
Doug Hitchcox
Maine Bird Atlas - Outreach Coordinator
Maine Audubon - Staff Naturalist
207-781-2330 x237
dhitchcox@maineaudubon.org
--
Maine birds mailing list
maine-birds@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/maine-birds
https://sites.google.com/site/birding207
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Maine birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to maine-birds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/maine-birds/CA81F767-6B85-4C24-BFBD-44AEBD07FE92%40mac.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
0 comments:
Post a Comment