The biggest website for birdwatchers is having major privacy issues. Privacy for the birds, that is, not the humans.
The first and only time I've seen an owl in the wild was a northern saw-whet owl in a tall bush right next to the path by the lake in Central Park. As soon as I got home, I submitted my sighting and where to find the owl to a message board for New York City birdwatchers. Immediately I started getting angry responses telling me to remove my post. Apparently, I had unknowingly violated a cardinal rule of birding: Never report the exact location of owls.
While birders post exact location details to message boards for all sorts of species (especially for unusual or locally rare birds), owls are a different story. An administrator for the message board explained to me why: Owls tend to stay in one spot for a very long time, they're more susceptible to being stressed out by human interference than other species are, and lastly, they're relatively rare, so birders are especially eager to see them.
Putting out an owl alert to a listserve of local birders would be like tipping off the paparazzi that Lindsay Lohan is leaving a nightclub with no underwear. It would end with the owl in tears, driving off erratically in an SUV.
Harnessing the power of the internet has been a boon for both birders and scientists, helping them add notches to their "life lists" (the list birders keep of what species they've spotted in their lifetime) while providing valuable scientific data. But now the pendulum is swinging back the other way, and the birding community is realizing it needs a technology solution to its human problem.
A northern saw-whet owl I spotted in Central Park in New York City. A friend took this photo.
Source: Rob Meyer / via: robmeyer.smugmug.com
Birders have embraced the internet in their own way; Yahoo groups are still active, a handful of bloggers exist, and localized rare-bird alerts still rely on people phoning in their reports. They tend to be older — the types more likely to have an email address with their internet provider in it than have to a Twitter account. However, bird-watching is one of the few pastimes where the weekend hobbyists are actually making crucial contributions to the scientific world, and ornithologists rely on this global network of amateurs.
The most ambitious online birding effort is eBird.org, a comprehensive database collaboration by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon Society. Users enter detailed information about the exact location, species, and numbers they observe. The site functions as a free way for birders to keep easy online logs of their own sightings while at the same time helping scientists by giving them the data they need about worldwide bird populations and patterns.
According to Marshall Iliff, project leader for eBird, the site gets 3 million global bird observations per month. Another arm of the ambitious project has volunteers transcribing scans of decades-old birding reports, which will result in the largest digital set of data of bird populations and provide invaluable information for researchers and conservationists.
