Mercifully I've been able to stay out of the paradox discussion, but I asked Marshall Iliff of eBird if he'd like to comment. Below is his contribution. It's long but answers many questions about the eBird project, which was launched in 2002 by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society.

Greg Hanisek
Waterbury

CT-Birds,

I am coming to this discussion a bit late, perhaps, but since Dennis
Varza's post brought up eBird I thought a few words of clarification were
appropriate about the service and goals of eBird.

1. First eBird is guided by the principle of providing output that is useful
   to birders and serves as a place to maintain your PERSONAL records. The
   sightings you enter in eBird are always accessible to you through "My
   Observations" as well as through listing summaries by country, state,
   county, month, and year.

2. Second, the entire eBird database, drawing on over 21 million
   observations from around the hemisphere can be summarized as EXPLORATIONS
   using bar charts, grid maps, point maps, graphs of frequency/abundance etc.,
   or arrival/departure tables (visit
   http://ebird.org/ebird/eBirdReports?cmd=Start to explore--you don't need an
   account). These allow birders to ask questions about bird occurrence
   patterns at a variety of scales (e.g., national, state, county, or
   site-level scales) and gain more information using direct summaries of eBird
   observations. We are constantly revising these types of output and have
   further plans for the future.

3. Third, every sighting is SHARED with anyone interested. Every observation
   contributes to the above output, is available as raw data via the Avian
   Knowledge Network. It is also passed on to North Am. Birds editors and
   regional journal editors, conservationists, etc. We provide the raw data
   files in excel format to anyone interested and are working to serve these
   data up in better and more useful ways.

4. Fourth, currently if one sees a Henslow's Sparrow on June day in
   Massachusetts, he/she will be asked by various groups to submit that
   sighting to: eBird, the MA Atlas, the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee,
   the Bird Observer, MASSBIRD, and the North American Birds editors, as well
   as the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game! How much better would it
   be if that individual could submit their Henslow's Sparrow to eBird, and
   have the record farmed out to all the other groups? One of our goals is to
   minimize data entry for birders. We also hope that the fact that each
   sighting can be put to so many uses should be an inspiration for birders to
   participate.

5. IF you have sightings you want EXCLUDED from public output (a bird on
   private land or a sensitive species), it is simple enough to click "Hide" in
   the report to hide it. This keeps the record in your personal records and
   makes it accessible only to the state reviewer (Greg Hanisek in CT); it
   otherwise is not available to the public.

6. We utilize a vast network of volunteers to make eBird LOCALLY relevant.
   These volunteers help us define hotspots, review records, generate local
   checklists for the checklist entry page, and provide guidance in other
   areas. In Connecticut Greg Hanisek has been our chief reviewer and recently
   revised the checklists to be more regionally specific (northern vs. southern
   Connecticut). We always welcome more involvement!

7. An ultimate goal is to CONSOLIDATE bird sighting information in a single
   database from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, not just in Connecticut but across
   the hemisphere. If we have 50 state-level databases plus another bunch for
   Canada plus different ones for Central and South America, then it would be
   painstaking to get complete occurrence information for a long-distance
   migrant like Swainson's Thrush!

Most importantly, eBird is set apart from every other bird database that I
am aware of by recording (and identifying) COMPLETE checklists. Most bird
databases have traditionally recorded "birds of interest": rarities, unusual
localities, early and late dates, and high counts are well-recorded for many
states through these types of database efforts. But the missing elements are
how much effort was expended to get those data, information on "common
species", and negative data (see below). Traditional databases do not allow
us to understand relative abundance, since they do not quantify effort and
do not record all observations. eBird encourages (but does not require)
reporting of all species, allows one to enter counts or just presence ('x'
in eBird), and in the process records the ABSENCE of a species as well as
its PRESENCE. Take a formerly common species that has disappeared, and it is
very hard to understand the decline. For example, the disappearance of
Loggerhead Shrike or Henslow's Sparrow in the East was not well documented,
because they were gone almost before anyone realized it. American Kestrel,
similarly, is disappearing right under our noses and our bird databases of
the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s do not record the decline because the species
was never considered rare enough to be closely tracked by such efforts. To
understand such declines, we need eBird, and we need it to have the broadest
use possible.

Dennis suggested that "some [information] is lost in the reporting", but I
am not sure what he is talking about. eBird has a great advantage over many
similar initiatives in that EVERY sighting is georeferenced with exact
lat-long information; one cannot ask for more specific locality info. Every
sighting is attached to an exact date and tagged to a specific observer, who
can then be contacted for follow-up. The one difference may be that eBird
does not identify individual birds (i.e., that a White-faced Ibis seen on
successive days is the same individual), but hopefully the analyst could
easily figure this out, especially if eBirders utilize their comments to
comment on the age/breeding condition of the bird and whether they believe
it to be the same or different than the bird previously reported.

We have started to explore ways to enter historical data via eBird and I
think there is great promise in such initiatives. Although old records
rarely allow one to estimate effort, they do give valuable information on
spatial and temporal distribution. And some old-time Ornithologists did keep
detailed records on distance traveled and time spent birding, which can be
used to enter a detailed eBird report. This type of information holds great
promise for comparing modern relative abundance to that of yesteryear.

I would hope that over the next year more CT Birds members give eBird a try
and ask themselves why they have not committed to eBird. For better or
worse, CT Birds is a great system for communicating about bird occurrence,
but is not a good system for archiving that information as data. Using eBird
to report your birds then allows you to click "email" at the top of the
report to share the list with CT Birds in a standard format (I further would
encourage editing of this list to just the sightings on interest to the
group).

If eBird is used by even 50% of the active birders in a state, it becomes a
tremendous resource for learning more about birds and for formulating more
refined questions about how and why populations shift in space and time.
Behind the scenes at eBird we are using lat-long information with GIS
information on habitat, climate, human population etc. to model occurrence
patterns, but that is a topic for an even longer email! Our biggest struggle
is making eBird data entry not feel like "work"; if you are not willing to
commit to submitting all your sightings, then please consider using eBird to
report your highlights from a given day afield.

I hope Dennis and everyone will give eBird another look! Feel free to
contact me directly with any questions

Best,

Marshall Iliff
Miliff AT aol.com
eBird Project Leader
West Roxbury, MA

This afternoon on the East side of Stonington point there were about 20
red-breasted mergansers, mostly male, and they were very busy diving and
coming up with something long, dark and thin in their beaks (could they have
been feeding on eels?). As soon as they surfaced they would be harried by
the gulls (herring, black-backed) and frequently had their lunch stolen.

4 loons were also feeding in the area but the gulls did not bother them -
perhaps they can swallow their lunch under water before returning to the
surface, or they are too fierce for the gulls to mess with, or else they did
not catch anything.

Also a few Canada geese and 4 brant geese.

Niall Doherty
Stonington