Attention please, we have an important announcement!

Effective today, August 31, 2008, Birdstack is owned and operated by Kapikpik, LLC. No, Birdstack hasn’t been sold or anything like that. Instead, Birdstack’s founders (David Ringer and Curtis Hawthorne) formed Kapikpik, LLC to help accomodate Birdstack’s growth and expansion.

This move will allow us to serve you better now and especially as we continue to grow.

As part of this legal reorganization, the Birdstack Terms of Service has changed. Please take a moment to review the new Terms of Service document.

Birdstack is free. However, running a website like this is an expensive undertaking. If you’ve been using the service regularly and appreciate what we offer, we’d like to ask that you consider making a donation to help us with our operating costs, which so far we have been paying out of our own pockets.

That decision is up to you, though. We love and appreciate you either way. :-) Really.

We’re excited about this new phase in the project, and we’re looking forward to continued growth and expansion in the future. We hope you’ll come along for the ride!

Good birding,

Curtis and David

The Ornithological Society of New Zealand and eBird have partnered to develop New Zealand eBird, a scientific database collecting information on bird distribution and abundance in New Zealand.

Birdstack’s eBird export tool has now been extended to include records from New Zealand.

If you’ve birded in New Zealand, look through your records and make sure they meet the requirements for export. Then, from any list containing New Zealand records (e.g., “All observations” or a year or country list), click the “Export” link and follow the instructions for eBird export.

You will be able to import your records either using the New Zealand eBird interface or the standard eBird interface, if you’re already using that.

And of course, the eBird export tool will continue to export records from North, Middle, and South America and the Caribbean (details) as well.

Data contributed to eBird is available to biologists and conservationists around the world. Bit by bit, it helps increase our understand of bird populations and their responses to changes in habitat and the climate.

Birdstackers have already exported several thousand observations for submission to eBird. If you’re one of the people who’s contributed already, thank you, and keep up the good work! If you haven’t gotten started yet, now’s a great time to begin.

Birdstack’s database has just been upgraded to conform with version 1.6 of the IOC’s World Bird Names project. Because this is our first major taxonomic update, we’ve been carefully working through the ramifications for you and for the Birdstack service. Most of you will be affected by this update.

The IOC announced: “Major features include alignments with Rasmussen and Anderton (2005) for the avifauna of South Asia, BirdLife World List International Version 1.0, and Christidis and Boles (2008) for the Australian avifauna.

“This update also includes taxonomic updates published or identified in peer reviewed journals since the posting of Version 1.5, upgrades of seabird taxonomy, and revisions of Ranges and English names, including Great Black-headed Gull (=Pallas’s Gull), Roughleg (=Rough-legged Buzzard), and others.”

Changes to English names, binomials, family assignments, and the like have been made automatically in the database. If you would like more information about the changes that have taken place, you can peruse the World Birds Names updates pages.

Other types of changes, though, will require your input. Most of you will see a pending taxonomic updates box in the right sidebar when you log into your Birdstack account. When you follow this link, you will see a list of the observations that need to be reassigned to newly created species.

Here’s a video that explains the process: taxonomic updates screencast (link updated 19 October 2008).

Because this is the first time we’ve gone through an update like this, please let us know how it goes for you as you work through the changes. Also, we’d love to see you talking with each other on the forums, offering advice and discussing the updates that have occurred.

Here’s some final information about the IOC list and the direction it’s headed. If you look carefully at the update pages on the World Bird Names web pages, you will see that there are many “proposed splits” included in the list, and that there are lumps that are pending but haven’t actually occurred.

The organizers of the IOC list are treating it as a work in progress — from my perspective a very reasonable way to proceed given the massive changes we are seeing in all levels of bird taxonomy and nomenclature. Here are some comments I received from Dr. Frank Gill:

“We opted to use this category [proposed splits] to be as current as possible with the literature, but with the recognition that some of them might not be accepted by leading authorities or us. So we post them as a first step, with a window of opportunity for feedback and review before conversion to ‘actual splits.’ We suspect that 90% or so will convert in 6 months’ time.

“More specifically, we view these as editorial steps towards the release of version 2.0 in January 2009, for which we will evaluate the decisions by BirdLife, AOU, etc. [...]

“[...] Our philosophy is that distinct allopatric populations should be recognized as species until it is proven that they will interbreed freely with another such population, and judged conspecific. [...]”

There are lots more changes ahead, but don’t fear. Rejoice! Birdstack is here to help.