As the last field season of the winter atlas approaches, it’s time to take stock and prioritize, as we did early in the last breeding season. To recap, winter field work is split into an early period that runs from 1 November until the end of December, and a late period that runs from 1 January until the end of February.
Within each period, our goal is to obtain a total of 10 hours of survey, spread across all years of the atlas. Many blocks have achieved this goal, and many are well on their way to being complete. But, there are still a lot of blocks that are far from completion, including a fair number with less than an hour of survey effort. Visiting these blocks is our absolute highest priority for this winter, so we’ve mapped them to make it easy to see where the effort will do most good (click here for a larger version of the map):
As with other parts of the atlas, anyone can submit data for any block – no need to check with anyone first, just do a survey and submit your data via eBird or one of the other options. We would prefer to have surveys broken up into separate 1-hour checklists (see this page for a refresher on the basic protocol), but any length checklist is better than no data. And, if you have a lake or pond, a stretch of river or coastline, or a roost site nearby, consider submitting the more specialized surveys that give us information that might be missed via the standard checklists.