November is coming to a close and so is its monthly challenge. In December, we’ll focus on both birding effort as well as media uploads. eBird media tools are a powerful way of documenting your records – not only do media help make checklists more illustrative and pretty, they also add great value to the documentation and overall repository of images and audio. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words!
The challenge this month is to upload a minimum of 30 effort-based, complete checklists of at least 15 minutes duration. All birders meeting this target will be recognized, and from among their lists, one list containing rich media will be drawn at random to choose who receives a small gift in appreciation. The more the number of lists with media, the greater the chances of winning!
Do look through this guide to uploading media on eBird to understand the process. You can upload either images or audio, but keep in mind the following things:
a. The media uploaded must be from the time and location of the particular birdlist.
b. Media must be directly uploaded to eBird, not embedded from third party sites (like Flickr).
c. The media uploaded should be of sufficient quality so that the species in question is identifiable.
d. Do rate your (and others’) images as well. Here’s the eBird guide to rating uploaded media.
If you do not have a good camera/audio recording equipment, don’t feel hindered! Even a point and shoot camera can take good record shots and you can get very good results even by taking images with your phone through a scope or binoculars. Phones are also very good devices for recording audio. So do give it a try!
Oriental Magpie Robin, female, by Renuka Vijayaraghavan/Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab
Please upload all your lists by 5 January 2018 so that we can announce the results the next day. Here are the general rules of our monthly challenges. And check out the yearlong challenges 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.
Header: Northern Pintail, by Ravi Naidu, Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab
