tips learned along the way

When exploring a new area, remember that you can set eBird to filter by month. Let’s say I want to poke around Gilpin County in February, and I’m wondering where people see birds there in February. When looking at the Explore Hotspots page, just click the time filter at the top right to choose the month you want.

When I am planning a trip, traveling to a new area, and/or are less familiar with a particular species, I often use the more detailed filters on the Species Maps page (see far left photo for how to get here). For example, if I am interested in seeing a Yellow-billed Cuckoo in NE CO, and have some flexibility when I go there, I can filter and see if May or June would be better, and where exactly they are seen in each month.

Colorado Field Ornithologists (CFO) provides this great resource of recommended places to bird in each county. I appreciate that there is access information, as well as birding information for each location they include.

A great resource for planning outings are the eBird lists from past DFO field trips. First, you can see where Denver Field Ornithologists is leading trips at various times of year, which can be insightful. Also, when you click on “details” for any given trip, you see the description, and also links to every eBird list submitted for the trip.

One of my favorite resources is Colorado Parks & Wildlife’s birding trails (a collection of stops in one area). While the above link goes to the main page that shows each trail, above you can see the detail for the North Park Trail. This trail includes 15 stops from Cameron Pass through Jackson County to Buffalo Pass. CPW provides seasonal and access information for each stop on each trail.

To figure out which birds you need for any given county or region, go to the Explore tab and choose “Target Species” in the lower left corner. I talk more about county birding in my blog for 1/26/2024.

Enter the region (if doing counties, just enter the name of the county), and choose the time of year. If I am headed to Larimer County and it’s January 8, I will just choose January. But if it’s January 29, I will use the custom date option and choose January and February. Choose if you want your targets for your life list, year list, or other options, and then click “Show Target Species.”

You get a list of target birds that shows the % of lists each bird appeared on during that time, and a link to a species map for each bird. So for Larimer County in January and February, the image above shows I am unlikely to find a new county bird, but will keep my eyes open for the top dozen or so birds on my upcoming trip just in case. Note – some %’s are distorted by chase birds / mega-rarities. You can identify those because on the species maps they are only in one place for a short period of time.

The eBird bar charts are a valuable tool because they display the frequency for each species, for every week of the year. To get to the bar chart for any Hotspot, first click on the Hotspot name on the Hotspot map. You will see an image like the one above for Tamarack Ranch SWA. Then click on “bar chart” in the blue menu on the left. You may also notice the button on the Hotspot maps page in the same box as the Hotspot name.

The bar chart pops up, and it lists all the birds that have been seen at that Hotspot. Notice that each month is broken down into 4 weeks. It can change a lot week by week, so this is very helpful. And the height of the green bar for each week is the frequency. Note that if some rare bird was seen and everyone went running and did a list, it may be a little distorted.

Finally, I like to adjust the date range (it is shown at the top of bar chart – see photo in Step 2). While the vast majority of data is from recent years anyway, I like to set the range to be the past 5-7 years because it’s likely to be more indicative of what I’m going to experience when I go. You can see above I set the years to start in 2017 rather than 1900. Then hit “continue” and it’ll update the bar chart.