Energized and excited by the activity around me, I drove on and stopped to explore an icy stream. There I watched a pair of Harlequin Ducks swim against the cold current of the thawing landscape and a pair of Wandering Tattlers probing quietly along the rocky shore. A bit higher, near the pass, several Northern Wheatears and American Pipits sang overhead in flight, and Gray-crowned Rosy-Finches, Snow Buntings, and Baird’s Sandpipers shared a recently thawed hillside with two bachelor Dall sheep chewing their cud.

After crossing Atigun Pass, the road descends through a long glacial valley to the North Slope. The gently rolling landscape is carpeted in dry tussock tundra, interspersed with small lakes, streams, and wide braided rivers. Smith’s Longspurs run among the…

The eBird taxonomyis available for  download. This update brings eBird up to date with Clements 6.7 (which will be released later this month), the most recent North American Classification Committee supplement (53rd supplement released in July 2012), and with South American Classification Committee decisions through June 2012.

These taxonomic updates involve three major elements. First, we must change the common name, scientific name, family, order, sort order, and several other elements everywhere that the name is used in our database. Second, we must add in a number of entirely new taxa, including newly described species, new hybrids that eBirders would like to report, or new groups that may someday become species.

Why try this?

Any experienced birder has answered hundreds of ID queries from friends, family and curious colleagues. But what about all those people who don’t have a birder as a friend? They are increasingly turning to the internet for their answers, struggling to get a meaningful result by typing a description of a bird into a search engine.  Now, a new project at the Cornell Lab is trying to change this scenario and offer a simple question-and-answer session to provide answers to everyday bird ID queries.  Merlin, an upcoming bird ID tool, uses a combination of eBird data, crowdsourced bird attributes and machine learning algorithms to help people get an answer and grow their interest in birds.  What if you have a photo too?

Just before 6:00pm Pacific time on 8 August 2012, Liron Gertsman of Vancouver, British Columbia, submitted the 100 millionth observation to eBird. It was of an American Robin; one of 24 species that Liron saw at the Maplewood Conservation Area that day. The director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, John Fitzpatrick said, “This is a true milestone in the history of field ornithology and citizen science. The power of so much data is only just beginning to be recognized around the world. I look forward to the time when even 100,000,000 observations seems like a quaint number! With eBird taking off so spectacularly now, that day is not so far off, and we are starting to discover some amazing new patterns about the natural world thanks to all these thousands of volunteer observers.”

In an ideal world eBird would have very densely-spaced data points being sampled repeatedly across the landscape. But we know birders aren’t evenly distributed out there, and getting off the beaten path can be a challenge. We hope these maps help show you where eBird needs more data, and where your birding effort can make a bigger impact on our ability to model birds in your county.

Bird distribution changes with the seasons, and at eBird we like to have data distributed throughout the year to track the ebb and flow of bird populations. With this in mind, we plan to update these maps each month so that eBirders will have a better idea about how the data volume changes in each state and county. Check back to see the maps for August around the 1st of the month.

There are places on our planet that can be appreciated, revered, and fully protected only in the context of earth time. The Grand Canyon is an obvious example, because it displays time so explicitly and majestically. Vishnu Schist underlying the inner gorge is 2 billion years old, the Kaibab Limestone on the rim is “only” 230 million years old, and the Colorado River took a mere 2 to 3 million years to cut through this gigantic time column.

Alaska is a less obvious example. Reverence for Alaska requires not just an appreciation of the gargantuan forces of glaciation and mountain building, but also a willingness to understand and to accept humanity’s place in earth time.

We can all predict what would happen if a chicken attempted to fly across the Pacific Ocean: it would not get far before becoming shark bait. How, then, did domestic chickens, which are native to Southeast Asia, find their way to South America?

The remains of a 600-year-old chicken dinner excavated from an ancient rubbish dump have solved the mystery of whether chickens were originally transported to South America by the first Spanish explorers or by trans-Pacific human voyagers long before the arrival of the earliest Europeans in the New World.

The Spanish explorer hypothesis has long been popular, but historians have long known of a perplexing wrinkle to that idea: