Calgary 2020 Big Year Birding Challenge

By Howard Heffler

Nature Calgary is promoting a friendly “big year” birding challenge within Calgary city limits in 2020. See this post for details of the challenge.

What Are eBird Alerts?

eBird Alerts are lists of noteworthy birds reported in the past seven days in a specific county, state, province, or country. The best place to learn about eBird alerts is on the eBird Help pages about alerts and targets.

In a previous article we described how to open an eBird account with your name and email address. It will be very helpful if you set the eBird parameters on “My eBird” to alert you about local sightings that should improve your chances of adding to your year list.

Setting eBird Alerts

You can get to the Alerts page either from “Explore” and then, near the bottom, open “Alerts.” Or, from “My eBird,” open “Manage My Alerts.”

There are three Alerts:

1. ABA Rarities

This alert is for observations of rare birds in the American Birding Association Area.

2. Rare Bird Alerts

Email alerts for rare birds in a particular area.

3. Needs Alerts

Email alerts for species you have not personally recorded in a particular region or time period.

The later two are likely the most relevant to participation in the BirdYYC2020 challenge.

You can set your region of interest to Calgary. It is important to remember that the eBird region named “Calgary” refers to an area larger that the City of Calgary.

After selecting Calgary as your region of interest, you can “View” the alerts or you can “Subscribe.” If you subscribe, eBird will send you an email – daily or hourly.

By setting your “Needs Alerts” eBird will notify you of all species reported in Calgary for the past seven days that would be new to your list of species on eBird. To be most useful to the BirdYYC2020 challenge, check the box “This year only.”   

The Rare Bird Alerts will inform you of ABA Code 3 and above reports in the region, whether or not they are on your needs list.

You can also set alerts for any other other region you are interested in, for example if you plan to travel. Alerts can easily be changed at any time from “Manage My Alerts” on your “My eBird” page. It is a very useful feature of eBird and birders participating in the 2020 challenge should take advantage of it.