PA Bird Atlas Winter Survey Protocols

Monday, October 21, 2024

The PA Bird Atlas Winter Survey will begin on December 1. There will be an on-line introductory town hall on Thursday, November 7, 2024 at 7pm. A link to the Zoom meeting is at https://ebird.org/atlaspa/news/october-and-november-atlas-town-halls. If you miss the town hall, you can watch it later on the Pennsylvania Bird Atlas YouTube channel.

Here is the information that was sent out in September by Amber Wiewel, Pennsylvania Bird Atlas Coordinator:

We are excitedly gearing up for our first ever Winter Atlas season! More info will come in October and November, but here are key points to help answer some of the questions cropping up.
* Winter survey season will run December 1 - February 28.
* Winter atlas data will be collected via the PA Bird Atlas portal in eBird. You'll need to switch back into the portal on Dec 1 if you've left it.
* Observe block boundaries for the winter surveys just like you've done during the breeding season. In other words, be sure to start a new checklist if you are crossing into a new block.
* A few targets will be set for surveying priority blocks (more on that soon), but data can and should be submitted from any and all blocks possible!
* What kind of data do we want? One of the most optimal ways to contribute will be to conduct 1-hour long, traveling (by foot, not vehicle) checklists in habitat patches in your blocks. Adding this standardization to the data collection (in this case, checklists of the same length of time) will allow for more comparison across blocks!
* In addition to 1-hour checklists, all traveling, stationary (including feeder watches), and incidental checklists will be welcome and helpful data.
* As for the 1-hour checklists, don't get too hung up on the "habitat." If a block has habitat patches of significant size, it will be ideal to try to stick to a single major habitat for a 1-hour checklist. But if the block is too patchy, we'll just have to do the best we can with the habitat we've got!

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