eBird

eBird is a global, internet based platform for collating observations of birds, and for birders to maintain records of their sightings. It is housed in Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology. Hundreds of thousands of birders use eBird, including many thousand from India.

By gathering and storing bird sightings, eBird enables the gathering of baseline data on bird distribution and abundance, and disseminates this information for public and scientific use.

Birders use eBird to upload and maintain their bird records. For each bird list, details of date and location are given, and ideally the ‘effort’ spent birding (in terms of duration and distance covered). Bird lists that are complete (ie, where all birds identified are uploaded) are the most useful to understand the distribution and seasonality of birds. You can explore the bird observations in eBird through a variety of features on the website, including species maps (eg, for House Crow), seasonality ‘barcharts‘ (eg for India as a whole), sightings from particular ‘hotspots‘ (eg, Bharatpur), and a variety of other tools.

For Indian birders, a dedicated portal is available: eBird-India. Do explore around, and join us in helping better understand India’s birds in order to better conserve them.