Birders begin annual count; LSU leads effort

• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jun 1, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Starting Sunday, birders across the state began their mornings looking and listening for winged critters that call Louisiana home during the summer.

For about six weeks, birders will choose a quadrant of land and spend at least 10 hours surveying for birds as part of a larger initiative through the Louisiana Bird Resource Center at LSU to develop a Louisiana Summer Bird Atlas.

Although a Louisiana Breeding Bird Atlas exists, it was published in 2000 using data from 1996 to 1998, said Richard Gibbons, coordinator of the Louisiana Bird Resource Center at LSU.

In addition, the atlas only shows maps of where birds or nesting sites were found, but has no information on how many birds a particular area might have, he said.

“What it doesn’t have is numbers,” Gibbons said. “We don’t have baseline information for abundance.”

“It’s not telling you which areas have the most birds,” he said. That kind of information, Gibbons said, could be important when trying to decide where conservation efforts or current populations of birds are located. The Louisiana Bird Resource Center is using an Internet site called eBird developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology with help from the National Audubon Society to help that effort.

“Times have changed in the last 10 years and the biggest is technology,” Gibbons said.

The eBird site allows birders make their observations, record those observations on the Web site and have the information almost instantly added to the database.

“You’ve got to be able to identify your birds by sight and sound,” Gibbons said.

In addition, the site includes filters that will “red flag” bird sightings that seem unusual for the time of year or location, or just aren’t expected, he said.

“Let’s say someone submits an ivory-billed woodpecker (sighting). That’s going to be red-flagged,” Gibbons said.

Those flagged items are then set aside until a reviewer, such as Gibbons, can get more information from the birder or checks the information.

This will be the second summer of data gathering for the new atlas, which could be a three to five year data gathering effort, he said.