A Holiday Greeting

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, Townsend's Warblers are typically the brightest and most patterned songbird we see during the winter months, hence they are a favorite among local birders. This adult female was photographed at Tillamook, Oregon on 18 December 2010. Photo by Dave Irons

The holiday season is a special time of year for BirdFellow. Though behind the scenes activities started much earlier, our first journal post appeared on 19 December 2008. Over the past two years we've added another 129 articles to this journal, created an online field guide, and built field reporting and listing tools that we hope will reshape the way you share your bird sightings. Reaching the point where we are now has taken longer than we originally anticipated, but a little extra trial and error has allowed us to make some refinements (nearing completion) that we think our users will appreciate.

This two-year journey has allowed us to make many new friends and resulted in relationships that we hardly anticipated. During 2010 we reviewed and and promoted the work of independent film makers Scott Crocker (Ghost Bird) and Michael Male and Judy Fieth (Watching Sparrows). We enjoyed meeting Scott when his thought-provoking film was shown in Portland, Oregon this Fall. We were pleased to learn from Michael and Judy that our publication of Elizabeth J. Rosenthal's review of Watching Sparrows produced a modest spike in sales of their various DVDs. I bought a couple DVDs for myself and found them to be thoroughly enjoyable. Once again we lent our support to the Delmarva Ornithological Society's annual bird-a-thon. This organization continues to do great work in an effort to preserve habitat for shorebirds and horseshoe crabs on Delaware Bay.

Here is a screen grab showing an example of a BirdFellow photo gallery. Ultimately, each species account will be accompanied by a gallery of images depicting the broad variety of plumages displayed by that species. Rolling your cursor over the featured image in the right hand window, makes the photo's caption appear across the bottom of the image. 

We've continued collecting photos for our online field guide from a small army of contributing photographers. We are now up to about 15,000 images, which we continue to sort. Many, many hours have been devoted to aging, sexing, and keywording them as we select those that appear in the BirdFellow galleries associated with each species account. There are numerous species for which we have either no photos or a limited selection, thus we welcome submissions from anyone who thinks that they can fill one of the holes in our collection. Further, we have created a field guide that allows contributions of knowledge from the community. By offering a "field note" at the bottom a species account, you add value and richness to our online guide.

In late November we published a discussion about eBird and the resulting response from you was extremely lively. The eBird project leaders monitored the exchange of ideas and after reading through your comments, came away with an improved understanding of the public perception of eBird. We were proud to offer a forum where this respectful discussion could occur and welcomed the multiple public and private responses from eBird project leader Brian Sullivan. 

This photo, taken looking south from the town of Cape May towards Cape May Point serves to remind me of a wonderful trip there in October 2010 and inspires me to plan similar adventures in 2011. Photo by Dave Irons

In the coming year we at BirdFellow.com expect to finally launch several social features that we are sure you will enjoy and use. May 2011 be a year when you see more birds, enjoy new and fantastic landscapes where those birds reside, and most importantly introduce a child, a friend, or perhaps someone you've yet to meet to magic of birding.