Help Complete the Winter Bird Atlas

[Doug Hitchcox]

With just a couple of weeks left in January, I wanted to make a plug for birders to help complete the winter portion of the Maine Bird Atlas. I’m still blown away by the effort last summer to get all of our priority blocks completed for the breeding season, and that gives me hope that we can get a lot more work done this winter.

As a quick reminder on winter atlasing: we just need people to go out birding! But we need help in certain areas (see below). The winter atlas is broken into two periods: early winter which runs 14 December through 31 January, and late winter from 1 February through 15 March. We need people to survey blocks, and ideally spend three hours in the earlier winter period, and another three in the late period (covering all habitat types in that block) for it to be consider ‘complete’.

There are a lot of remote blocks in the northern half of Maine, and while some are challenging to access, many are still available off main roads. We have a ‘block buster’ page where you can see our highest priority blocks, here: https://sites.google.com/view/atlasblockbusters/home

There are also plenty of blocks elsewhere (lower priority) that could use effort. This next map will show you call the blocks, with gray blocks being ‘complete’. Purple blocks already have enough effort in the late winter period but need some time while we’re still in the early period to complete them — this is our last winter of atlasing, so we’ve only got a couple weeks to finish those. Pinkish block are complete in early winter, so those don’t need any effort until we hit 1 February. And yellows blocks have some effort but not yet to 3 hours in either period. You can click on any of the blocks to see exactly how much effort has been spent in each. That map is here: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/88f5217da43144cd9eb1c2fbc5fbea4d

And some helpful links for the atlas are:
Maine Bird Atlas Homepage: maine.gov/birdatlas
Quick Start Guide for Winter Atlasing: https://www.maine.gov/ifw/fish-wildlife/maine-bird-atlas/get-involved/quick-start-guide-wintering-birds.html
Winter 2022-23 Newsletter with many helpful articles: https://www.maine.gov/ifw/fish-wildlife/maine-bird-atlas/docs/Black-capped%20Chronicle%20Issue%2011%20Winter%20202223.pdf
and I’ll recommend joining our Weekly Zoom Q&A (Thursday nights at 6:30) for updates and if you have any questions we can help with: https://www.maine.gov/ifw/fish-wildlife/maine-bird-atlas/get-involved/trainings.html

Happy winter atlasing!

Doug Hitchcox
Maine Bird Atlas - Outreach Coordinator
Maine Audubon - Staff Naturalist
207-781-2330 x237
dhit...@maineaudubon.org