Date: 4/2/26 12:29 pm From: Ginger Langdon-Lassagne via groups.io <binzer...> Subject: [slocobirding] California Bird Atlas: news and pointers for better data
Happy April to all birders! Spring has sprung here, and we are seeing and hearing more and more of the birds who call SLO County their home for the breeding season!
I’d like to update you all on the latest local news from the California Breeding Bird Atlas Project. San Luis Obispo County is CRUSHING IT. As of this past weekend, less than 3 months into the project, we hit 50% of our total atlas blocks visited, within our county!!!

[Image of SLO County’s atlas blocks, from here: https://ebird.org/atlascalifornia/effortmap ]
This is is an absolutely phenomenal result for a county that’s this rural, and contains so much land that’s military/private ranch/Diablo Canyon Power Plant inaccessible to the public. We are working to gain access to many of those blocks, and I’ll eventually be reaching out to volunteers to go into those spaces. Let me know if you would like to be on that short list!
Additionally, the quality of the data that you all are producing is truly excellent. The vast majority of the breeding codes that we are seeing used in this county are accurate and well-documented. You are all doing so much for SCIENCE! If you haven’t joined the project yet, for whatever reason, please know that we’re open to people joining whenever it makes sense for you, and sooner is always better! If you want to look into more on what we’ve been doing, here’s the California Bird Atlas YouTube Channel with more information: https://www.youtube.com/@CaliforniaBirdAtlas
For those that have already joined, I’d like to pass on a couple pointers that might help us be even more fabulous in the data collection effort. When you are in the field, and you hear a bird making a sound, it can be challenging to determine if this is a time when you should use the “S” code for “singing bird.” Wrentits are known for “singing” year-round, for one example. Here’s a good rule of thumb to keep in mind: if the sound is described as “song” in the Sibley app or in Cornell’s Merlin app, then it’s a singing bird. Often, we encounter birds singing here that typically migrate away to other places to breed. It’s appropriate to us the “S” code for a Yellow-rumped Warbler singing at Morro Bay Marina, or a White-crowned Sparrow in Paso Robles, even though they’re unlikely to breed there. If you detect some indication that the bird is actively defending a nesting area with the song, you can mention that in the comments. So… don’t be afraid to use “S” for birds that are going to migrate. Additionally, I’d encourage you to familiarize yourself with what *IS* the song of the more common birds. The Spotted Towhee was a surprise for me!
Comments in the checklist, and other documentation such as photo or audio or video, are truly VITAL in the bird atlas efforts. Sometimes, I find myself in the grocery store parking lot without a camera, when a bird is exhibiting breeding behavior. If you’re not able to take a video, then a narrative description of EXACTLY what you observed is crucial to the final analysis of the data. If it’s carrying food, what was the food? Going from where? To where? Don’t try to get inside what the bird is thinking. Just report how you saw it behave. A funny example of this — I recently thought I saw courtship behavior between two California Towhees in my garden. They approached each other, fluttered their wings like fledglings do, and proceeded to pick up a stick and a blade of grass, respectively. I thought, “Awwww, they are gathering nesting material! How sweet!” After dancing around each other for about 30 seconds, one of them attacked the other with its stick! I looked up the behavior of California Towhees in Birds of the World, and discovered I wasn’t witnessing courtship — it was a “knife fight” of territorial defense! Your best tools for this task are Cornell’s Birds of the World and Merlin bird ID’s audio database.
Thanks for reading along if you’ve made it this far into the message. :-) I hope to make these a regular feature here on Fridays, with weekly tips for using the codes, and requests for specific locations to round out our coverage of the county. For now, just know that you all are doing so much more than we expected when his project began! THANK YOU!
Loving this Community Where I Live & Bird,
Ginger Langdon-Lassagne
Regional Co-Coordinator, California Bird Atlas
<binzer...>
