Using eBird for finding a shooting location
eBird, an online platform run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is one of the best resources for aspiring bird photographers. It isn’t terribly difficult to use but it does have a minor learning curve. Let’s go over some of the best ways to use this website to find the bird species or general location that you are interested in.
I usually have an idea of what bird I am interested in photographing before I begin so this first section is focused on the best way to use eBird to find a particular species.
This is particularly helpful when you already have an idea of the location that you want to focus on and have just one species that you are after.
First, on the main page of eBird, we want to click on the explore tab.
First, click on the EXPLORE tab in the top left corner.
Under the heading “MORE WAYS TO EXPLORE”, click on “SPECIES MAP”.
On this page, we have two areas to input information. The first is the location. In the right info box, type the general location that you are photographing in. Next, type the name of the species you are looking for in the “SPECIES” info box on the left. In this example, I have put in a location close to me and am searching specifically for the Bald Eagle.
Once you have input this information, you will see sighting bubbles populate the map. If you don’t see any, try zooming out or widening your search. In this example though, we can see that the search returned plenty of results. Bubbles in blue show historical sightings while the red bubbles show sightings that have happened recently with multiple reports from several individuals. I like to keep my search to the red bubbles as many birds are seasonal and we want to know if they are present right now.
To further explore the information that eBird has to offer, lets click one of the red bubbles. First, lets zoom in a bit to really get an idea of how many sightings have happened in this area.
Red bubbles with a fire symbol indicate a sighting hotspot. If present, I always click on these.
Notice that we are now seeing a list of sightings within the single bubble. Lets click on the entry with 32 Eagles counted by the poster.
This final screen shows us other species that this poster has reported from this location on this date. This is really useful to get an idea of the general diversity of this location.
What if we aren’t looking for a particular species? I often go out to locations that I know will have a lot of diversity but with no particular species in mind. This tool is also really good for that! In this case, we want to go back to our original “EXPLORE” page. On the bottom right, you will find a link that says “EXPLORE HOTSPOTS”. That’s what we want!
On the “EXPLORE” main page, click on “EXPLORE HOTSPOTS”.
Now we are presented with a heat-map of reported sightings. Feel free to explore this map as you will often find locations that are great for photography that you didn’t know about. For our example, we are going to stick with the same location as above.
Again, in the style of a heat-map, we see that there are several sighting areas that people have reported from. From here, you are free to zoom in to more specific locations or to look for bubbles with a high number of species observed.
At this point, the results of clicking on a bubble will look just like in our previous example.
As you can see, finding what you are looking for on eBird isn’t difficult at all. The main page can be a little overwhelming but I hope that this article helps you navigate through that and gets you out into the field, and more importantly, coming home with some great shots in the bag!