Add your voice to Birds of the Equinox!

September 18th, 2009

Birds of the Equinox

Birds of the Equinox is a project to document birdlife around the world during the September equinox, which is next Tuesday — 22 September at 9:19 p.m. UTC (that’s 10:19 p.m. in London and 2:19 p.m. in Vancouver). We want to hear from you, wherever you are that day! Here’s how.

Depending on your cultural outlook, equinox marks either the beginning or the midpoint of a season. Depending on your hemisphere, that season is either autumn or spring.

It’s an excellent time to stop and reflect on the birds around you. What’s changing? Are birds returning or passing through? Are they departing? Are they singing or molting?

At some point within 12 hours either side of the equinox, go birding — even if it’s just by looking out your window for 10 minutes. Record your observations in a trip on Birdstack. Take pictures. Blog your thoughts. Here are more ideas, an official timetable for participation, and the rules. (And for further inspiration, check out Birds of the Equinox: March 2009).

There are Birdstackers on six continents, and we’d love to have participation from Tasmania to Finland and from Capetown to Gujarat. Entries are due by 28 September, and by 2 October, we’ll post a compilation of your observations, pictures, and thoughts.

If you would like to promote Birds of the Equinox on your blog, you can copy and paste either of these code snippets:

Banner (500px by 110px):
<a href="http://birdstack.com/solar-birding/september-equinox-2009""><img src="http://birdstack.com/images/equinox-banner.jpg" alt="Birds of the Equinox" title="Birds of the Equinox, a Birdstack community project" /></a>

or

Button (165px by 165px):
<a href="http://birdstack.com/solar-birding/september-equinox-2009"><img src="http://birdstack.com/images/equinox-button-rth.jpg" alt="Birds of the Equinox" title="Birds of the Equinox, a Birdstack community project" /></a>

You can also RSVP/promote Birds of the Equinox on Facebook.

Good birding!

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Taxonomy upgrade to IOC 2.2

September 6th, 2009

We’ve just finished updating the Birdstack database to conform with version 2.2 of the IOC’s world bird list. If your data was affected by any splits or lumps, you will have a notification. For help with the upgrade process, check the taxonomic updates help page and the taxonomic updates screencast.

Highlights include addition of 13 species, 108 English name changes primarily for endemic and near-endemic birds of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, and resequencing of New World trogons.

You can explore further at IOC World Bird List Updates.

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Planned Server Downtime on 2009-07-11

July 9th, 2009

On June 11 at 9:30 a.m. EDT (UTC: 2009-07-11 at 13:30) we will be taking the main Birdstack server down for up to 3 hours in order to perform routine maintenance and upgrades. That means there will be no way to access the site during this time, and your stacks will not load on other websites. We’ll do our best to get it back up as quickly as possible (hopefully less than three hours).

These upgrades will help pave the way for some new features we hope to launch in the next couple months.  Stay tuned!

Update: Upgrade complete!  Turns out my 3 hour estimate was way too high; the process took a little less that an hour.

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Taxonomy upgrade to IOC 2.1

July 3rd, 2009

We’ve just finished updating the Birdstack database to conform with version 2.1 of the IOC’s world bird list. If your data was affected by any splits or lumps, you will have a notification. For help with the upgrade process, check the taxonomic updates help page and the taxonomic updates screencast.

Version 2.1 contains 10,340 species classified in 39 orders, 224 families and 2198 genera. Highlights include addition of 14 species, including eight albatross species, and 19 English name changes including the Madeiracrest to Madeira Firecrest and Pediunker to Grey Petrel.

You can explore further at WorldBirdNames.org.

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Birds of the Equinox compilation posted

April 6th, 2009

The Birds of the Equinox: March 2009 compilation has been posted! Enjoy.

And mark your calendars for June 21, the solstice.

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Change in Privacy Policy

March 24th, 2009

Today (24 March) we added a paragraph to the Birdstack Privacy Policy relating to the potential use of third-party cookies. You can review the changes under the “Cookies” heading in the Privacy Policy.

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Taxonomy upgrade to IOC 2.0

March 22nd, 2009

We’ve just finished updating the Birdstack database to conform with version 2.0 of the IOC’s world bird list. If your data was affected by any splits or lumps, you will have a notification. For help with the upgrade process, check the taxonomic updates help page and the taxonomic updates screencast.

Version 2.0 contains 10,331 species classified in 42 orders, 226 families and 2,199 genera. This is a major update that includes revisions of the family classification as well as species taxonomy. You may notice significant revisions in orders and families based on the results of important genetic studies. Our assumptions and hypotheses about avian systematics are undergoing major revisions as more information becomes available. Among other changes, the list now includes more than 200 recently split and newly described species, revisions of the Old World Warbler families, and a resequencing of suboscine families to align with South American Checklist Committee classification.

You can explore further at WorldBirdNames.org.

Posted in taxonomy updates | 1 Comment »

Add your voice to Birds of the Equinox!

March 16th, 2009

Birds of the Equinox

Birds of the Equinox is a project to document birdlife around the world during the March equinox, which is this Friday — 20 March at 11:44 a.m. UCT (that’s 7:44 a.m. in New York and 10:44 p.m. in Sydney). We want to hear from you, wherever you are that day! Here’s how.

Depending on your cultural outlook, equinox marks either the beginning or the midpoint of a season. Depending on your hemisphere, that season is either autumn or spring.

It’s an excellent time to stop and reflect on the birds around you. What’s changing? Are birds returning or passing through? Are they departing? Are they singing or molting?

At some point within 12 hours either side of the equinox, go birding — even if it’s just by looking out your window for 10 minutes. Record your observations in a trip on Birdstack. Take pictures. Blog your thoughts. Here are more ideas, an official timetable for participation, and the rules. (And for further inspiration, check out Birds of the Solstice: December 2008).

There are Birdstackers on six continents, and we’d love to have participation from Tasmania to Finland and from Capetown to Gujarat. Entries are due by 27 March, and by 5 April, we’ll post a compilation of your observations, pictures, and thoughts.

If you would like to promote Birds of the Equinox on your blog, you can copy and paste either of these code snippets:

Banner (500px by 110px):
<a href="http://birdstack.com/solar-birding/march-equinox-2009""><img src="http://birdstack.com/images/equinox-banner.jpg" alt="Birds of the Equinox" title="Birds of the Equinox, a Birdstack community project" /></a>

or

Button (165px by 165px):
<a href="http://birdstack.com/solar-birding/march-equinox-2009"><img src="http://birdstack.com/images/equinox-button.jpg" alt="Birds of the Equinox" title="Birds of the Equinox, a Birdstack community project" /></a>

You can also RSVP/promote Birds of the Equinox on Facebook.

Good birding!

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Specify your time zone and date format preferences

February 4th, 2009

We’ve just launched a new feature that will make Birdstack a little cozier for some of you. You may have noticed that dates on comments, forum posts, activity feeds, and the like were all in Universal Time. For those who live outside Europe and western Africa, this made it hard to tell when things actually happened.

But now you can specify your local time zone on your account settings page (accessible through the dashboard). This will convert all system dates to your time zone, making it easier to tell when things like comments and activity feed items were actually posted.

And for those of you who live in places that use daylight saving time, these changes will be made automatically for you!

Note that user-entered times on observations and trips will NOT change based on your time zone selection. This is intentional. If somebody records an observation made at 6 p.m. in Sydney, you don’t want to see it presented as having occurred 2:00 a.m., you want to know what time of day the observer was experiencing the bird.

Another new option is to see dates shown in either month-day or day-month format. By default, all dates are shown as 4 February 2009. But now you can choose to show the month first: February 4, 2009.

Similarly, we’ve introduced an option to format times in 12-hour format (11:00 PM instead of the default 23:00).

Again, these new options are available on your account settings page, accessible via your dashboard.

Enjoy!

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Birds of the Solstice compilation is online!

December 31st, 2008

It’s here: Birds of the Solstice: December 2008! Birders from around the world participated in this inaugural event. There’s lots of great stuff to explore, so we hope this will be some happy holiday weekend reading for you, wherever you may be.

We’re planning to do this again 20 March 2009 — Birds of the Equinox this time — so stay tuned.

Happy New Year!

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