Monitoring and Outreach

Help us Learn More about Birds in California with eBird!

A premier online birding program has been developed for you in California! Audubon California and PRBO Conservation Science have partnered with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to create this free website, specific to California, to help us learn more about bird distribution and abundance throughout the state. As the same time, you can keep your checklists online and accessible at any time! Bird sightings that you previously stored in notebooks, the edge of your field guide, or in your own computer format can now be safely stored in Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s database and at the same time provide useful information to biologists and other birders. We encourage you to select one of the Important Bird Areas in California, learn more about the site, keep track of your sightings, and enter your records. Or, you may choose your own favorite birding site or “hot spot” using the interactive Google maps provided. You can also select an IBA site and learn about what birds others have seen at the site, times of year, abundances, and more. With your help, we can begin to complete the picture of how birds are distributed across the diverse California landscape and what changes may be occurring in the future. Visit an IBA site, note the birds you see, and give eBird a try!

Why Should I eBird?

Contribute to a growing database of knowledge of California birds!

In March, 2007, California was the second highest state in the U.S. in terms of numbers of checklists submitted at 2,136. With your help, we can add many more. A network of local editors reviews all checklists submitted in California for accuracy. eBird shares your observations with a Calfornia community of educators, land managers, ornithologists, and conservation biologists. In time these data will become the foundation for a better understanding of bird distribution across the western hemisphere and beyond.

Keep your life-lists organized by County, Region, State, ABA area and more!

eBird safely stores your data in a secure facility that is archived daily, and is accessible to anyone via the eBird web site and other applications developed by the global biodiversity information community. In the “My eBird” page, all the data you submit is stored in checklist formats, and accessible at any time. This is a great way to maintain your lifelist!

Get a checklist of birds for a birding trip!

If you are planning a visit to a local IBA or birding hotspot, or traveling to another part of the country, you can view birding locations or IBAs by selecting those regions or sites, and then view species lists including seasonal abundance.

Help Audubon California and partners learn more about bird distribution and abundance at Important Bird Areas across the state!

The 148 IBAs designated in California relied heavily on records submitted by birders across the state. Now that we have these sites identified, we would like to learn more about the birds that inhabitat them and keep track of potential changes to these sites over time. eBird is a perfect tool for Audubon to harness data gathered by birders at IBA sites that we can then use for management and conservation outcomes.

Contribute your sightings to an international network of eBird users!

The more people use eBird nationally and internationally, the more we will learn about global distributions of species and be able to track changes. For example, scientists may be able to gather information on the timing of migration of songbirds in the US and determine if changes may be related to climate change.

Visualize data with maps, bar charts and graphs!

You can visualize your data or data from any site you choose through checklists with bar graphs displaying months in which each species was observed, frequency and abundance charts for each species you choose, the sample size of data, and much more. Try visiting eBird and playing with some of these great tools!