November County Challenge

[Pam Hunt]

Greetings all,

As November 2 comes to a close, here's the first report on standings for the NCC. Remember that I'm NOT mining the eBird review queue right now since it's too time consuming when I've got a lot going on. This means that species totals for each county are preliminary and like low, depending on how many rarities got turned up this weekend. Maybe once I've moved I'll try a couple of times to update the totals, but certainly not each time I provide an update.

So here's where it stands now:

County	MAX	2-Nov	% 11/2	Rank 11/2
Belknap	138	41	0.297	7
Carroll	152	30	0.197	10
Cheshire	165	60	0.364	3
Coos	139	30	0.216	9
Grafton	166	39	0.235	8
Hillsborough	169	60	0.355	4
Merrimack	191	76	0.398	2
Rockingham	273	87	0.319	6
Strafford	188	66	0.351	5
Sullivan	137	55	0.401	1
State	305	123	0.403

As always, it's nice to see Merrimack off to a strong start, but I expect we'll sputter out as usual in the next 4 weeks (Merrimack birders are welcome to prove me wrong!!). This at least in part due to the 18th annual Concord November Challenge, during which 24 of us found 78 species within the city limits (at least 4 of which aren't in the total above).

For anyone new to this game, the rules are simple: go birding in the county(s) of your choice and ebird what you find. Rankings are based on the current number of species (e.g., the "2-Nov" column above) divided by the all-time total for each county in November ("MAX"). Over the years we've tried various other ways to calculate a value that seems "fair," but none work particularly better than the others. This is the simplest, so I'm sticking to it. 

Next update in a week or so.

Pam Hunt

Concord