I’m a little late to be presenting you with some 2019 New Year’s Birding Resolutions. But better late than never! Following my stab last year at a Thoreauvian Big Year (~10 mile journey radius, no cars), the bird blogging world has glommed onto the super-local birding craze with a new concept of counting the birds within a five mile radius of one’s home. And by “new,” I mean that it now has an acronym: 5MR. The notion in its current form has its center of gravity at Northwest bird blogger Flicker Jen’s I Used to Hate Birds, who I praise for the endeavor. Today, I’ll briefly recap the concept, steal a few of Jen’s other ideas for parallel challenges, put it into a local northern Marin context, and try to make it as straightforwardly actionable as possible, with one clear goal: to get you looking more at the birds around your home.
The Big Idea: The Glories of the 5MR
What are some of the pleasures of focusing your birding within a five mile radius?
- You’ll spend more time birding and less time merely travelling.
- Less time travelling also means a lower carbon footprint and transportation costs.
- You will find there is a lot to discover under your very nose! New places you’ve never visited, or seldom looked at closely… birds you didn’t realize were present so close to home… a greater awareness of birds’ distribution and seasonal movements… I sincerely believe you learn more when you slow down and spend less time merely seeking a wider variety of species. See the concluding post of my 2018 Thoreauvian Big Year to see what these kinds of lessons might look like in our area.
- You can enjoy the fairly innocuous birder pleasure of making lists and checking things off without the simultaneous difficulty and cheapness of chasing distant rarities. Traditional chasing is a time-consuming pain, while rarely being as fulfilling as making your own discoveries. In addition to tallying up your five mile species total, 5MR birding lends itself to several other fun, listable adventures described below.
That’s it in a nutshell! If you want some more inspirational encouragement and general background on five mile birding, I encourage you to take a look at Flicker Jen’s FMR FAQ or Seagull Steve’s “The Five Mile Radius. Is there anything more chic in the birding world right now? Let me answer that for you…no. No there is not.”
How do I get started?
In its simplest form, all you need to do to get started is to visit this site to generate a quick circle-on-a-map so you know where your boundaries are. Then head outside! Maybe print out a copy or save a screenshot, taking down a few notes on where the boundaries are and what parks and likely birding spots are within the radius.
If you want to take the next step, the tool which makes it easier to both find more birds within your radius and to keep track of your 5MR count is eBird. The basic way to set this up is to use eBird’s Patch feature. They haven’t automated a five mile radius patch yet, but what you can do is create a patch on your account called “5MR” or some such variant thereof, and then associate both public eBird hotspots and personal locations under that umbrella. The clumsy part is that whenever you add a checklist from a new destination within your five mile circle, you need to go into your patch and add the new location. The neat part is that if you are already are an eBird user and have past checklists from locations within your 5MR, you can also see your historical 5MR counts for comparison: what is your life 5MR count? How many birds did you see in it last year?
eBird Challenge #1: Set up your 5MR patch. Count lots of birds in it. 200 species would be quite strong in most places (that’s my goal), but if you’re counting birds for the first time, 100 would be a perfectly fine goal. You can set your mental goal anywhere in between.
Or, if you are new to eBird and are just itchin’ to go birding within your five mile radius, while not feeling any immediate need to document birds beyond that distance, you could skip the patch process for now and just start submitting checklists that you know are within your radius. Then your overall “year list” will be the same as your 5MR list. If you later add a few checklists from outside the radius, you can mentally subtract them. If you later a lot of checklists from outside the radius, you can always set up your 5MR patch later, once your main locations are already established.
How do I keep going?
The most basic game involved in five mile birding, as in most birding challenges, is to see as many species as possible. For a lot of useful tips on how eBird can help you find new places, particular species, or recently reported birds of interest, see my post from last year about Five ways to use eBird to see more birds.
But today is also a good opportunity to look at the other side of the equation too: how can you not only benefit from eBird, but contribute to it? In addition to endlessly entertaining birders, eBird supplies vast quantities of data to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to help us understand bird distribution and population trends. One minor flaw in the “gamification” aspect of the platform (which has worked remarkably well at garnering eager participants), is that there is a certain tendency among some people to follow the leaders, to visit established hotspots, and to look for the same birds that other people are seeing.
eBird also, however, has useful tools that you can use in setting different goals, goals to visit the less visited places. New hotspots – locations with lots of birds that lots of people might want to visit, such as Stafford Lake or Deer Island Open Space Preserve – are created each year as our area gets better explored by eBirders. These hotspots show the general richness of our area, encourage people to explore, and help practically structure birders’ understanding of where different birds are found. And we are a very rich area, make no mistake: my five mile circle has nearly 30 established hotspots. Some poor people sharing their 5MR adventures on the bird blogging world have zero, or one. What other local birding games and challenges are latent within the world of eBird hotspots?
eBird Challenge #2: Fill in bar charts. Any eBird hotspot’s historical sightings can be displayed in a bar chart showing occurrence throughout the year, with each month divided into four periods (three periods of seven days and the last period for the remaining 7-10 days). Look at these charts for a favorite or nearby hotspot – where are there gaps in the record that you could help fill in? To see a bar chart, visit any hot spot – say Pacheco Pond, and click “Bar Charts” at the top of the species list.
(If you really want to explore, I had too much fun with spreadsheets and you can see the major gaps in a bunch of my Novato/Northern San Rafael hotspots here. I delve a little deeper, highlighting not just the “zero checklist” weeks, but also the “one checklist” weeks, because, hey, a single checklist is probably going to have missed some stuff.)
eBird Challenge #3: Increase our hotspots with 100+ species. Another way to measure how well our hotspots are documented is by the overall species count. Our most well-covered hotspots with water can reach 200 species (the Las Gallinas Ponds are at 247); woodland hotspots can easily exceed 100 (Mount Burdell is at 139). I wouldn’t get hung up on adding a few more rarities to the already well-birded hotspots, but this gives you a rough guide as to where there are more birds waiting to be seen. Some hotspots are newly created and are still a largely blank canvas; others have seasons when they are seldom visited. For instance, some Novato hotspots with growth potential include Day Island (97 species, only created last year), Indian Tree Open Space Preserve (71, also less than a year old), Indian Valley (87), or Scottsdale Pond (88). Plus when a location crosses over 100 species, it turns from blue to green. Let’s make a lot of green points on that map! (I made a list of my local hotspots and their current species counts on another tab on my spreadsheet too, for general interest.)
Then there are other parks and preserves that are not currently hotspots on eBird. Novato examples: Miwok, O’Hair, Pioneer, and Lynwood Hill Parks; Little Mountain, Verissimo Hills, and Ignacio Valley Open Space Preserves; Hamilton’s Reservoir Hill. Is one of these in your neighborhood? Could you visit it regularly? Create a personal location in eBird, submit a few checklists to get an idea of the birds there, and then suggest it as a public hotspot.
eBird Challenge #4: Personally be in the top 5 checklists or species count for your favorite local hotspot. For competitive people who like a more personal challenge, eBird hotspots also list the eBirders with the top number of species seen or checklists submitted at each hotspot (unless you choose anonymity). You can be the expert here! Or think of it this way: 87 bird species have been reported at Indian Valley Open Preserve. The top individual has seen 64. You live nearby, can go there easily and readily, but have only seen 25. Think how much more there there is to discover! Visit at different times of year. Go on trails other than your normal ones to see different habitat types.
eBird Challenge #5: Boost your yard list. When the point is local birding, it would be remiss to neglect the most local birding of all: the birds in your yard. Create a personal location for your yard and see how many birds you seen there over the course of the year. If you submit checklists regularly, this can give you valuable insight into the calendar of bird migration. If you want, you can also designate the location as your yard in eBird, so that you can easily jump right to your “yard list.”
The 5MR in Action: My January
To make this more concrete and inspiring, let’s take a look at how much fun I’m having. Here’s my circle:
Pretty great! Burdell to Las Gallinas, Big Rock to the Bay, with nearly 30 hotspots within the circle. I’ve got oaks, forest, savannah, marsh, ponds, mudflats, and a tiny bit of the bay. All told, there are certainly more than 200 species occurring in my circle in a given year – I just have to find them.
January got off to a solid start on New Year’s Day with a fortuitous sightings of both a redhead and a long-tailed duck in Bahia. I then made several small trips to fill some bar chart gaps at various local spots such as Indian Valley, Scottsdale Pond, Cemetery Marsh and mostly just allowing my list to gradually and naturally fill itself out out. The late-month highlight was a day at Hamilton, sighting a burrowing owl in the fields to the north of the wetlands as well as a few horned larks. As of the end of January, I’m at a solid 121 species with quite a few easy pick-ups still to be had (I haven’t even made it to Las Gallinas yet this year) and three very good birds under my belt which I have never before encountered so close to home.
What’s next on the agenda? I’m looking forward to exploring some hotspots that I didn’t even recognize existed within my radius including the trails at Port Sonoma across the Petaluma River and the open space preserves on my southern border at Loma Alta and the Terra Linda-Sleepy Hollow Divide. I’ll also surely make it to our top eBird hotspot at the Las Gallinas Ponds in February, where I wouldn’t be surprised to pick up another several species in a single day. It’s still the peak waterfowl and gull season, so I will make efforts to get the obvious outstanding candidates in those groups. And then migration begins! Look for Allen’s hummingbirds now and then the first migrant rufous hummingbirds, orange-crowned warblers and swallows at the end of February and in early March.
And should the flow of novel birds start to slow, there is always the new 5MR ancillary challenge of filling in the severe bar chart gaps at Indian Tree, Indian Valley, Day Island, and Cemetery Marsh for the month of February. Help me out – let’s turn those grayed out cells green!
Resources
Now that you’re totally psyched to start birding your 5MR, you might want some additional tools and info. Especially during the next few rainy days when all you can do is plot and scheme.
- eBird: If you don’t have an eBird account, go sign up. This is an easy way to track your sightings, either by smartphone app or by entering your checklists later at a computer. But it is also the most incredible tool for finding more birds in your local area, as described in my earlier post.
- Draw your circle. You can do the quick and dirty version here. Or you can read the instructions here for how to create a circle you can save as a location in Google maps, if you have a Google/Gmail account. Then you can even upload the eBird hotspots to it for study, reference, and general admiration: here is the result of my beautiful labors.
- My super duper local hotspot spreadsheet. It has two tabs at the bottom:
- The bar chart gaps. If you want to help fill out our local charts, you can use this as a reference. I’m not promising I’ll scrupulously update this throughout the year, but you can look at it as a general guideline for upcoming weeks to see where your birding could contribute most to our picture of local birdlife.
- A bunch of the existing Novato and San Rafael hotspots with their species total as of 1/26/19. This isn’t complete, so don’t treat it as such, but it is just kind of interesting to look at.
- More bird bloggers writing about the 5MR, from whom I have borrowed both general inspiration and specific ideas. Flicker Jen of I Used to Hate Birds is the 5MR headquarters of the internet, including a 5MR FAQ, a 2019 Challenge, a Facebook Group, and a compendium of other bird bloggers jumping on the bandwagon. Seagull Steve of Bourbon, Bastards, and Birds is a particularly irreverent Santa Clara blogger and 5MR missionary. In his words:
So what do you have to lose? Dare to be different. Draw up your own 5MR and start tearing it up. Bird it relentlessly. Become one of those “local experts” you’ve always heard so much about. Reap the rewards (and savings!) of being a patch-pummeler. If you want to be weird and do a 3MR or a 9MR instead, no one will stop you (not even the bird police!)…or you could be part of the 5MR movement, and join me in shaking up the birding world with a new kind of list…you will quickly find it scratching an itch that you may never have known you had.
(From his original 2018 5MR post)
Excellent – thanks, Jack!