Local Correspondents Needed

In recent days many of you may have seen introductory announcements about BirdFellow.com that appeared your local birding listserv. As a result of this effort, hundreds of new visitors sampled our site and journal for the first time last week. The feedback we’ve received has been quite positive. Hopefully, you found our postings of interest. Most of the folks involved in the ongoing development of this website, and those who’ve written posts for the journal, live and bird along the western edge of North America, which has created a bit of a Left Coast slant to our offerings. We are definitely looking to broaden the scope of our postings so that there will be both a continental and a local angle to what you see at BirdFellow.com.

With this in mind, we would like to take advantage of our new-found connectedness and develop a weekly feature that highlights both rare sightings and other avian events going on across the continent. The posting of the introductory announcements required subscribing to each of the listservs, so we are now able to sample the postings from a wide range of states. Obviously, there is not enough time in the day  to read all the messages from each state (most members of our small team have day jobs). Even if we could, it would be hard for us to assess which sightings or local issues are of the greatest interest to the birders in your particular state, province, or region. In the coming weeks, there are whole host of local migratory bird festivals taking place around the country. As an example, there is a Sandhill Crane Festival in Othello, Washington this coming weekend (March 20-22) and in mid-April the Redwood Regional Audubon Society’s annual “Godwit Days” will be held in Humboldt County, California.  

We are looking for folks who might be interested in becoming a local “correspondent” for their area. If you are interested in acting as a correspondent for your state, province, or region, please contact me via e-mail at: llsdirons@msn.com. We will put a premium on vetting and verifying all rare sightings before sharing them with our readers. Ideally, it would be nice if reports of extremely rare birds included a photo that we could include with the weekly summary. Currently, most statewide listservs are not set up to handle photo submissions.

We look forward to hearing from those interested in developing this feature and sharing exciting bird news from all over North America. We would also like to hear your thoughts on what you would like to see discussed in this feature and other journal postings.