Take the eBirding challenge – click here for details
eBird is a global, internet based platform for gathering 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, which now has a repository of 200 million bird records, with 600,000+ from India (and growing!).
By gathering and storing bird sightings, eBird compiles 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 200+ million bird records 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.
The eBird platform is gradually being tailored to make it more friendly and useful for Indian birders. If you are new to eBird, take a look at this beginner’s guide here. For information on the naming of Indian birds in eBird, as well as some changes in taxonomy due to recent splits in species, see this article, which also gives a comprehensive listing of Indian species.
Various bird events and projects in India use eBird as a platform for gathering and managing data. On the list to the right, these are marked with .
We look forward to welcoming you to eBird!