Most serious birders keep lists of the birds they see. Most of us have a list of the species seen in our major birding area, i.e. the American Birding Association area for North American birders like myself. This has always been relatively easy to do manually, or by using a software solution like Avisys on a PC or BirdBrain for Mac users. There are lots of other software options that have been in use for the last 30 years since home computers became the norm for many of us. Lots of us kept a list of species we had seen in our more local area, in the U.S. of our State, or even our County. We might also have kept a yard list. Still, keeping several lists became tedious and there was a time when most of us said, "Enough already."
For the last few years list-keeping has become a natural offshoot of the way many of us record our bird sightings. In much of North and South America, and to a lesser degree throughtout the whole world, eBird use has become a popular tool and record keeping essential. eBird at first was a bit time consuming because it required birders to go to the eBird website online, usually after a birding outing, and record their sightings. This duplicated the in-the-field effort to keep notes of what we saw, or required trying to recreate from memory bird sightings at a later time. The popularity of eBird dramatically increased when a smart phone app became available for purchase allowing birders to record sightings in real time in the field, and upload them to their eBird account. This app was later purchased by Cornell and became the eBird mobile app for both android and iPhone users.
Using eBird automatically keeps track of the species a birder sees, and keeps a list of your species seen each year, and all-time in any given county, state, province, country, major area and the whole world.
This ease of record keeping has led to many birders following their lists closely, especially at the county level. Friendly competition has encouraged this, and I have lots of fun keeping up with the expert local birders in my Pierce County, WA year list each year. In addition I can look at my county life lists for any county of interest, and see what species I "need" for that county life list.
There are lots of tools on-line to help county birders see what rare birds have been seen in their county. eBird lets you choose what e-mail alerts you choose to have sent to you daily, or even hourly for rare birds in the region of your choice, as well as a "needs" e-mail alert of species seen in a given area you have not seen either this year or ever. Still, even if you choose hourly alerts, and tolerate the e-mail load this creates, some of us like other online tools. I use http://countyrarebirds which allows you to register, and open your county rare eBird sightings page on loading the site, or choose any other state, province or county easily.
County birding has enhanced my birding experience and led to closer communication and more cooperative birding with the local birding community.
I hope you have found this of interest.
Good Birding. Steem on!
