eBird Tips - Searching Your Sightings

I was talking about eBird with a friend and he was lamenting how he didn't seem to have the functionality with searching his own sightings that he did with the old Avissys program. Specifically he said there was no way to search for all of his sightings for a single species.

Actually this very easy to do in eBird, just not obvious where you should start at.

The way you would do this is to go to the "My eBird" tab. At the top you'll see the total of your life list highlighted in blue and underlined. This is a link to a listing of all the birds you've reported to eBird. Click on this link and you'll be taken to a list of all of your birds.

Notice that all of the data in this list is highlighted in blue and underlined. These are all links too. Say you wanted to see all your sightings of Amazon Kingfisher. Scroll down the list to Amazon Kingfisher and click on the link for Amazon Kingfisher. Voila! you have a listing of all your reports of Amazon Kingfisher.

Suppose you wanted to limit the geographic region you were interested in? Say you wanted a list of all of your reports for Amazon Kingfisher in Texas. For that you would go back to the "My eBird" tab, then click on the State/Province subtab, Click on number for your Texas Life list and then scroll down to Amazon Kingfisher and click on that. Simple no?

So maybe you have a lot of sightings, maybe you want to work with all your Great Blue Heron reports. It is possible to download the records from these reports. Looking in the upper right corner of the list, you'll see a link titled "download (csv)" there. Clicking on this link will download these records in a file that can be opened in Excel or other program for spreadsheets.

Also note that the data in each column is a link. Click on a location link and you will get your life list for that location. Clok on the S/P link and you get your life list for that state or province. Click on the date and you will get the checklist that includes that record.

eBird doesn't provide a query for your data with a form, but it does provide a simple way to retrieve these kinds of records with just a few clicks. Using and exploring your data is actually very simple in eBird.