Watching, Learning, Protecting

At the end of 2022, we challenged our members to make 2023 a “Big Year”. A copy of that original post is below. The year was bigger than we anticipated with a final count of 1,027 species. It was so much fun, we decided to do it again for 2024. Can we beat that fabulous number from last year?

If you have forgotten to share a list from the first half of 2024, you can still do so at any time. Of course we’d also love for you to share your future eBird lists. The user name for SIB Big Year is simply SIBBig.

• As of June 30, SIBBig has a reported 505 species for 2024! When the “species” include the family names where the exact species couldn’t be determined (ex. “gull, sp.”) there were 536 species.
• SIB members shared 393 eBird lists from 10 countries. (Note, members didn’t share every list they reported in 2024.) Not surprising, the most species were reported in the United States.

United States 431
Mexico 49
Panama 40
Costa Rica 26
Germany 22
Caribbean Netherlands 16
Jamaica 7
Antigua and Barbuda 5
Martinique 3
Aruba 2

To date, members have reported birds in 14 states in the US. Given the number of “SIB Travels” to Texas, that state had the most species at 266 compared to 222 in South Carolina.

We’d also love to hear a “SIB Travels” story when you get a chance … you can provide the wording or we can compose using information you provide. Just send an email to SeabrookIslandBirders@gmail.com.

If you missed some of the SIB Travel blogs, you can find them here by doing a search on our home page for “SIB Travels” .

Below is the information in our original blog. The process remains the same, just change 2023 to 2024.i

We want to try a new fun “activity” for 2023. As you know, a big year is a personal challenge or an informal competition among birders who attempt to identify as many species of birds as possible by sight or sound, within a single calendar year and within a specific geographic area. Rather than have a competition among members, let’s see how many different species the group as a whole can see for the year. We already know members’ plans for the year include trips to Costa Rico, Panama, Yellowstone, Maine, Portugal and Northwest Washington. With our normal birding activities, we should have a good count for the year.

To facilitate this activity, I created a new eBird account with a user name as SIBBig. This account’s profile is set to not appear in any rare bird lists, Top 100, or other public lists. This is to avoid misrepresenting the account as a personal account.

Anytime you go birding, just enter your sightings in eBird as usual. Then when you “submit”, you have the option in eBird to Share your checklist with other members of your party. Just include SIBBig as one of those you Share with. The “share” button isn’t available if there is only one observer so you would then need to go into eBird later to share.

You can also share a previously submitted list by going in to eBird and once you view a checklist, you can share, using the button on the left side. You would use this option if you were the only observer or if you choose to share all lists periodically rather than as you enter. I plan to periodically share using this method as I’m not likely to remember as I enter the checklist.

If you don’t have or want an eBird account, you can share your sightings by sending an email to SeabrookIslandBirders@gmail.com. That email needs to give the date, start and stop time, where you did the birding, the number of birds for each species. We’ll then enter directly into SIBBig for you. We strongly encourage you to participate in citizen science yourself by submitting to eBird but we don’t want to miss great sightings.

Some rules on your reports (similar to eBird’s rules):

• Birds must be identified between January 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023.
• Birds recorded must be wild and unrestrained.  Oh, and alive.  No pets, no feral stuff, no road kill.  Unless you hit it.
• Location is not restricted to SC, the Lowcountry, or any other region. As an example, if you go to Costa Rico, all birds identified count. Of course those identified in your backyard also count.
• Birds must have been ethically found.  No trespassing, harassing birds, kidnapping better birders, etc.
• Birds can be identified by sight or sound.  For a bird to count, a majority of the birders who observed it must agree on its identification. 
• Score will be kept with the SIBBig eBird account.  As described above, the easiest way to add to the list will be to share an eBird checklist to that account.  If you don’t use eBird, just send a list to SeabrookIslandBirders@gmail as described above and we’ll see that it gets added.

I look forward to seeing our list grow. Remember, you can start sharing your lists at 12:01am on January 1. We’ll periodically report our status.

Submitted by: Judy Morr