It's almost 2017! James Muller's first Rogue Birder post provides some insight on how to use eBird to narrow down your search for those hard-to-find birds in Ohio. As a way to kick off your new year, James takes a look at the January species. Bird On!


Targeting Ohio

With 2016 winding down, I've been thinking about starting on my 2017 list. I decided to see what help I could get from the eBird bar charts. It's a ton of data, but after some wrangling, some sorting, and some filtering, I ended up creating a spreadsheet that shows the "best" week to find each of Ohio's birds.

I did a little filtering to take out the 150 most common birds, since it would be hard to NOT see things like Cardinals and Song Sparrows, and I took out the Mega Rarities (after all, I don't think there's enough data to tell me what the best week is to find Heerman's Gull in Ohio).

January is the best time to find a Great Black-Backed Gull  in Ohio - Photo by Chris Collins

After pulling out some of the birds that are always a surprise, like Say's Phoebe, I'm left with some target birds for each month, and even for each week. The target birds for January are:

Week 1
Hoary Redpoll

Week 2
Common Redpoll
Black-legged Kittiwake

Week 3
Great Black-backed Gull
Rough-legged Hawk
Short-eared Owl
Long-tailed Duck
Cackling Goose
Northern Shrike
Long-eared Owl
Northern Saw-whet Owl
Iceland Gull
Golden Eagle
Common Raven

Some of these are skewed by the numbers of people looking in one place at one time, which is why the Golden Eagle shows up in January's third week: the OOS trip to The Wilds generates a distorted number of sightings. Overall, it seems like a sensible list for January though, with the rarer gulls, ducks and geese topping the list, along with the owls and redpolls.

I'll see how this works to drive my year, with periodic check-ins. It should help me decide what to look for when I have a day free for birding that isn't taken up by a chase! Click here to download the original document; maybe it can help you too!

Cackling Goose (right) - Photo by James Muller