Date: 5/26/26 6:50 pm From: Tom Benson via groups.io <thomasabenson...> Subject: Re: [OrangeCountyBirding] 507
Orange County birders,
All of the Pin-tailed Whydah and Swinhoe's White-eye observations in Orange County in eBird have been re-coded from Provisional to Naturalized. It may take a day or so for the changes to appear in eBird's public outputs. If, after a couple of days, you are seeing erroneous exotic codes for these species on past observations, please let me know. Keep in mind that all new observations of these species will continue to be coded as Provisional until the default setting is changed by eBird administrators during one of their regularly scheduled updates. Until then, new observations will be manually changed periodically.
To give you an idea of how rapidly Swinhoe's White-eyes have exploded in the county, here are the approximate number of observations for select recent years (does not account for shared checklists):
2022 - 80002024 - 120002025 - 170002026 - 9500
Tom Bensonoccasional Orange County eBird reviewer
On Tuesday, May 26, 2026 at 01:40:15 PM PDT, Ryan Winkleman via groups.io <rswinkleman...> wrote:
All,
Kimball Garrett announced this morning that the CBRC has accepted Pin-tailed Whydah and Swinhoe's White-eye to the California state list. Because Orange County has established populations of both of these species (hahaha 😔), they will also be added to Orange County's list as well. This raises Orange County's total bird list to 507.
https://groups.io/g/CALBIRDS/topic/two_new_naturalized_bird/119499169 --
Ryan Winkleman
Rancho Santa Margarita
