eBird Express Goes “Live”

eBird itself has now published a lengthy writeup on eBird Express, with a number of kind words directed my way.

Over the last few months, I’ve had a number of conversations with the good folks at eBird about eBird Express and how it should work. I want to give a big thank you to them as well, for I certainly couldn’t have made the tool as good as it (hopefully) is without their feedback.

One of the helpful tidbits they’ve provided in their post is another way to quickly download a list of species suitable for making your own template.

One quick and easy way to build a template species list for your area is to download the bar chart. Did you know that any bar chart you generate can be downloaded to a spreadsheet with a single click? Simply look for the “Download Historgram Data” at the bottom right portion of any eBird bar chart. By clicking this link you download the species list from the bar chart with weekly frequency values. If you are a wiz at excel, you can use the frequency values to pare the list down to the more frequent species in your area (try summing the frequencies and then sorting by that value). But regardless, it provides a quick way to generate a species list for your area with species names that correspond perfectly to eBird!

While I had suggested using Avibase in my tutorials as a source for bird checklists, eBird’s method is another great alternative.

New Template Repository

And speaking of templates, I’ve now added a page to download templates from. The nice thing is that I’m using an installer for these templates, so that when you download them, they will get put in the right directory automatically so that Excel can see them.

I also need your help. If you have additional templates which aren’t on this page, I’ve made a form for submitting them. All templates should be for national or state / province level checklists. Please do not send regional templates such as county checklists or park checklists.

I hope everyone enjoys using eBird Express, and if you have any questions or problems, let me know.