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Are you an eBird user? Here is a simple tutorial on how you can easily grab your state and county totals from eBird for your NYSOA County & State Listing report.
First, one of the ground rules: MAKE SURE YOU DON’T COUNT SPECIES THAT ARE NOT ON THE Checklist of the Birds of New York State in your totals (e.g. Chukar, or any NYS species not yet accepted by NYSARC).
The checklist is online at https://nybirds.org/Publications/ChecklistNYS.htm.
Start by printing the latest downloadable mail-in form so you can write the numbers on it (do this even if you are going to enter your data online--it will make transcribing the numbers super easy). PLEASE use the online form; otherwise I will have to enter our numbers. If everyone made me do that, I'd spend about 10 hours on data entry before I could begin compiling.
As you complete the steps below, write the totals onto page 2 of the form.
When you have all the numbers you want to submit, you can enter them online.
GETTING THE NUMBERS:
Go to ebird.org and login. Then follow the steps below.
STATE TOTALS (as of December 31st of the year just ended):
1. Click My eBird at the top of the screen.
a. If you see "New York, United States" as the bold header, skip b-d.
b. To the right of the bold location header, click Change region.
c. In the window that pops up, type new y in the first field (labeled Region).
d. You will see New York, United States (US) below your typing; click on that.
2. Below the bold location header ( New York, United States), the Species Observed number is your NYS LIFE total..
3. If you are sure you didn't get any new NYS lifers since 12/31, skip to step 4.
To determine whether you have gotten any new NYS lifers since 12/31:
a. Click your number of Species Observed below the big bold header.
b. On the next screen, for SORT BY at the right side, select Date: Newest First.
c. Check the DATE column to see if you got any new NYS lifers since 12/31.
If you did, subtract them from your current NYS LIFE total.
d. To return to your NYS summary page, repeat step 1 above and then continue with step 4.
4. For your NYS YEAR total, refer to the first bar chart (Your species by year).
The second bar represents last year; your NYS YEAR total for last year is to the right of the bar.
COUNTY LIFE TOTALS (as of December 31st of the year just ended):
5. Follow step 1 above to get to your NYS summary page if you're not there already).
All the NYS counties for which you've entered records are listed below the bar charts.
6. Click the NAME column header in order to alphabetize the list.
7. Copy the LIFE numbers onto your paper form.
8. If you had no new lifers in NYS after 12/31, go on to the REGIONAL TOTALS section below.
If you did have new lifers after the end of last year:
a. Repeat steps 1-3 above to get back to your NYS life list, with newest listed first.
b. For each new lifer you got after 12/31, reduce your life list total for that county by 1.
Tip: If you aren't sure which county a sighting was in, click the date next to it on your NYS life list to view the checklist containing that sighting. The county is included in the location at the top.
REGIONAL TOTALS (as of December 31st of the year just ended):
Getting your regional totals together is a lot tougher to do with eBird, since NYSOA's Kingbird regions are not defined in eBird.
THE MAP OF NYS COUNTIES AND Kingbird REGIONS is available online at
https://nybirds.org/CountyLists/map-counties-kbregions.pdf.
Here are some options.
The old-fashioned way: You can use NYSOA's handy checklist booklet, assign the regions you bird most frequently to checkbox columns, and then check birds off as you see them during the year. Or you can print off a paper checklist for each region and check birds off on it throughout the year.
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USING YOUR eBird DATA TO DETERMINE REGIONAL LIFE TOTALS
eBird: You can download your eBird data as a csv file and then use Excel for the regions that have boundaries coinciding with county lines. This will work for all but those few counties in western NY that are split by regional boundaries: Orleans, Genesee, Wyoming, and Cayuga. That’s where the old-fashioned checklist & pencil approach may work best in any case.
EXAMPLE: What is my life total for Region 10?
Note: If you use a different version of Excel from mine, the click-by-click may differ slightly):
1. Download your ebird data and open the csv file with Excel (on the eBird website, click My eBird and then Download my Data near the bottom of the left sidebar.
2. Click on the "Data" tab in the Excel ribbon at the top of the window, then “Filter”. This will put drop-down arrows on the columns.
3. Remove all entries with dates later than 12/31 of the year being reported:
Click the little arrow at the top of Column L (Date) and uncheck the box next to the current year (i.e. the year following the reporting year). Then click OK to filter those sightings out.
4. Now filter on the County column for the 7 counties in Region 10: Bronx, Kings, Nassau, New York, Queens, Richmond, Suffolk. (Click on the little arrow at the top of column G, Uncheck Select All in the resulting drop-down, and then click the boxes next to those 7 counties. Then click OK and you will have only the sightings for those 7 counties (which constitute Region 10).
5. Add a sheet to the workbook.
You will use this to create a sheet with ONLY the Region 10 data:
(a) Select the original sheet (click the MyEBirdData tab).
Click the triangle at the upper left corner of the sheet, above the row numbers and left of the column letters.
Press Ctrl-C to copy all the data.
(b) Click on the tab for the new sheet you created.
In that sheet, Click on cell A1 and press Ctrl-V to paste the data you just copied, for the 7 counties in Rgn 10.
6. Now remove all but one sighting per species on your new sheet, in order to get the species count.
(a) Click Data at the top, then Remove Duplicates.
(b) In the window that pops up, click Unselect All, and then click Common Name (or Column B) and OK.
Now you’ll have one line per species/subspecies/hybrid for the region.
7. Delete the rows that are not for unique full species -- get rid of sp., hybrid, and subspecies rows:
(a) Select Column B.
(b) Find all the "sp." entries:
- On a PC, press Ctrl-F and enter sp. in the popup.
- Click the Find all button.
- You will get a list of all the cells containing "sp."
The "Cell" column in the list tells you the cell where each occurrence appears.
- You can delete them one at a time.
TIP: work from the BOTTOM of the spreadsheet upward as you do the deletions.
If you work from the top down, every time you delete a row, the succeeding row numbers will change!
ALTERNATIVE APPROACH:
- If you are comfortable highlighting them all (one by one) before deleting them all at once, do it that way.
Always check what's in Column B before you select a rwo for deletion!
And remember, UNDO (or Ctrl-Z) is your friend if you make a mistake!
(c) Select Column B and do the same thing with indeterminate (e.g. Greater/Lesser Scaup)
This time, do a Find all on Column B for / (slash)
Check what's in Column B before you delete any row!
And remember, UNDO (or Ctrl-Z) is your friend if you make a mistake!
(d) Select Column B and do the same thing with hybrids & subspecies of species already listed
[e.g. Northern Flicker followed by Northern Flicker (yellow-shafted)]
NOTE: Do NOT delete "Rock Pigeon (Feral Pigeon)" if that is the only entry you have for this species!
This time, do a Find all on Column B for ( (left parenthesis)
Check what's in Column B before you delete any row!
And remember, UNDO (or Ctrl-Z) is your friend if you make a mistake!
7. Delete rows containing species not on the NYSOA checklist.
(eyeball check is the only way, sorry!).
8. Now look at the number of lines that are left in the spreadsheet and subtract one for line 1 (since it contains headers only).
ONE MORE THING: County names that are used in other states
If you have sightings in Orange County, NY and Orange County, CA (for example), you’ll need to filter out the non-NY sightings before you copy the sheet.
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AVISYS: If you still have it, use the old but superb bird listing program called AviSys, which allows you to define geographic regions that encompass multiple counties. You can even define your own locations for regions 1, 2, 3, and 5, which have boundaries not wholly coinciding with county lines. For example, I have "Cayuga North" and "Cayuga South" because Cayuga is split between regions 3 and 5. Then you have to manually assign your sightings to those partial counties to derive your regional totals.
Once you have your data assigned to the regions properly in AviSys, the job is easy. However, it’s a bit of a pain syncing between eBird and AviSys.
Note: Jerry Blinn, the creator and maintainor of AviSys, died in 2015. Since that time, a facebook group page was set up by Kent Fiala called AviSys Birding Software, and Kent has been providing some tools and files on his website at avisys.info
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Whatever your approach…MAKE SURE YOU DON’T COUNT SPECIES THAT ARE NOT ON THE Checklist of the Birds of New York State in your totals (e.g. Chukar, or any NYS species not yet accepted by NYSARC).
The checklist is online at https://nybirds.org/Publications/ChecklistNYS.htm.
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