Indian eBirders had a busy time in February with all the events, festivals and the GBBC – and Feb’s monthly challenge involved birding as much during the GBBC dates as during the rest of the month. March is here, and it’s time for a new monthly challenge to look forward to!
Birding is often a social activity, and a great way to meet others with similar interests, make new friends and involve others around you and sharing the joy of spending time with the avian life that surrounds us.
In keeping with the spirit of birders birding together, the challenge this month is to upload at least 30 effort-based, complete 
checklists of at least 15 minutes duration. Crucially, at least 3 of these lists should be ‘shared‘ between 3 or more birders!
When you go birding with your friends, and then upload the lists of species seen, you can ‘share’ the list with those who were on the trip, and then the list of species gets copied into each person’s account (so there is no need for each person to upload their list separately).
This list is an excellent example of a shared checklist. Note how you can click on the ‘List’ button to see each individual person’s list. Once shared, each person can tailor the lists specifically to what s/he saw – deleting missed species, and adding species that the others may not have recorded. In this way, everyone on the trip can keep a faithful record of what they saw.
Birders flocking together. Pic: Harman Kour
Note also that if you just want to show others your list, you shouldn’t ‘share’ with them; rather, you can simply send them the URL to your list (eg: http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist/S30191358).
Please upload all your lists by 5 April 2018 so that we can announce the results on 6 April.
Here are the general rules of our monthly challenges. And check out the yearlong challenges for 2018 as well! You can keep track of fresh lists coming in from India at this page.
Important. if you are new to eBird, please read this description first, and do take a look at our quick-start infographic and also the more comprehensive Beginner’s Guide.
