A New Use for Yearly County Listing Data

This marks the fourth year, beginning soon after Stacy Peterson and I put www.IdahoBirds.net online for the first time in 2004, wherein the county yearly listing frenzy has continued. What at began as just a few “crazies” in a limited number of counties competing against each other for biggest yearly species list bragging rights has swelled into an all-county (or almost so) statewide, all year, record keeping marathon, all kept on a somewhat sane, orderly keel by Lew Ulrey.

I like to occasionally look at the IdahBirds.net web page and check out how the various counties are doing as much as any other insane Idaho birder. And I find the updates on IBLE (some more regular than others, simply because of the personnel coverage advantage that some counties have) interesting… and yes, informative. But I would like to suggest a more “serious purpose” for these lists than the obvious.

When looking at each migratory species across the board, it becomes quite obvious what are the arrival dates (both early and mean) for each bird throughout the state… and in each county (and with a little bit more application, each geographic, or even topographic, section of the state).

Let’s look at it this way: Let’s say that someone wants to know when Chipping Sparrow first arrives in Idaho each year, as both an earliest arrival date and as a mean/average arrival, the information is easily accessible to make the necessary determination. And obviously with each additional year archived, there is a greater sampling from which to draw.

If this is starting to sound like an entry level statistics class, let me hopefully make it more practical. Yesterday there was an article by Seth Bornstein, an AP Science writer, published here locally in the Idaho Statesman newspaper refers to the changing dates (much earlier) for both the Washington D.C. cherry blossoms emergence and various butterflies appearing in flight over recent history. Many have also declared with anecdotal authority that our migratory birds, Neotropical and North American, are arriving earlier each year.

Well…these county lists can be Idaho’s database for a realistic assessment of arrival dates for all our migrant species.

But for these otherwise meaningless appearing dates to have any lasting significance, here are some vital things in which we all, to some degree, can have a part:

1. Carefully and accurately note all of your first arrivals of the spring.
2. Post your arrival dates directly on IBLE, Inland-NW-Birders, or SWIBA.
3. Send your dates to your county compiler (they are listed on the IdahoBirds.net site… even if you think your sighting may not be the first of the year… You never know, it may.
4. “Someone” needs to compile and work with the available dates on each of these birds (arrival for each, mean arrival date over the years, earliest arrival date), put the data in a spreadsheet form, and send the information someone who has a very specific plan for its wider utilization… Me! (More on that later… I promise.)
Maybe someone with an accountant’s mind (or who just desires to provide a lasting, potentially impacting service for understanding Idaho’s birdlife) wants to take on a few counties (or just one)… or maybe even head up this project (help put it together)? I want to definitely hear from you…. Please… pretty please. :)

There are some other just as important sides to this, which need to be worked out also. Perhaps you have an idea that you could share that would set us here in Idaho on our way toward getting all of these necessary bits of information:

1. Departure dates are needed, just as arrival dates. How can we begin to amass them?
2. Dispersal dates – arrival and departure – would be very valuable. For instance, when do we see our first Red-breasted Nuthatch in the lowlands each year (perhaps even none in some years)? When do they leave (or as in a recent case, stay over the summer)?
3. Winter (or sometimes summer, depending on the birds) invasion/dispersal species from the “North” (some predictable, others not) need to be “mapped.”

We are sitting on a goldmine of information, information that at least partially is very readily accessible and just waiting to be utilized.