Date: 8/28/26 11:50 am From: Harry LeGrand (via carolinabirds Mailing List) <carolinabirds...> Subject: The new-look Birds of North Carolina website
Folks,
About a month ago, the Birds of North Carolina (BNC) website, for which I am the principal author/editor, crashed badly, such that it was feared the data would be lost, once the website could be rebuilt. The BNC webmaster, Tom Howard, WAS able to recover most of the data, such that *the text in the roughly 500 species accounts was still there!* Whew!!!!!! This is perhaps why the website has a new look to the species account -- on a pale blue background instead of white, with purple headings. The text for some features has been moved around by Tom, but it is all there from before the crash. Here is the website home page, and you will see the new format once you click on a letter and then click View next to the species you choose.
We Carolina Bird Club members, hopefully nearly everyone who lives in the Carolinas, received the Summer 2026 Chat recently. Sadly, one feature that was lost was the Edit function, for me to add important Spring Briefs for the Files in that Chat onto the species accounts. It took Tom considerable effort to get me a needed Edit function to be able to add any new data, but by Monday that was completed. I finished adding in the more important spring reports by noon today -- so the text is up-to-date through the end of May.
However, if you have seen a species account, you might have noticed *there are NO county maps.* The occurrence county maps, with green where there is a record, are gone. And, for breeding species, the red-dot county maps showing relative abundance, also disappeared. We don't know if those can be recovered. The main issue here is that the public has no way to check a species map if they have a new county record -- for which a number of folks entered data onto a tab on the left margin to enter the species, location (county), date, and photos. As a result, without those maps, this function is not of value, and Tom has removed that Enter Record tab.
So, we will have to live with no maps for the species, at least for a while. Please note that I did not create the green maps, but I did review the records entered, accepted the ones that seemed correct, and then a white county would turn green. However, I did NOT try to populate the maps for other folks' records from eBird or another source. So, some or many maps were not really up-to-date.
I mentioned the lack of the county maps -- which for mainly non-migratory animal groups such as mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and vascular plants ARE important -- to several folks,* and wondered if species maps could be generated using eBird data. * An eBird list shows a county, though in some cases that can be misleading if the bird seen was actually on another side of a lake, for example, or a list covering parts of two counties. If there is a download function available on eBird, it seems plausible that a user could do a filter for a species, state, and county, and not worry about the date, observer, and number of individuals. For example, it seems plausible to generate a data file, to be converted to an Excel file, perhaps, for Hudsonian Godwit, North Carolina, and "county". These data only go back to the early 2000s, though some folks have entered eBird lists from pre-2000 for their rare birds, if they have the date, location, etc. So -- any county maps would probably lack important records from the 20th Century.
*And, you must be able to get from a download of Species and NC County to a county map format *-- which is beyond most of our bandwidths, I assume!! One eBird reviewer mentioned to me of a great interest is being able to have such county maps generated from eBird lists, and that he might make a stab. *Are any of you reading this aware of someone, some state, etc., where county occurrence maps have been generated from eBird data? *I'm not talking about the species maps that show on eBird -- the maps with the red and blue pins, which show where the reporter was at that time. I'm envisioning a species map with a solid color if there is an eBird list from that county. And, if someone is able to actually "pull that off", maybe maps could be color-coded by recency by decade, for example.
This commentary has gone on long enough, but I need to let folks know why the BNC website looks different and why the county maps are gone. If we can get county maps recreated, even with eBird data instead of Chat data, then we can re-open an Enter Record tab for folks to add new county records. Lastly, Tom said that there MIGHT be a way to recover data from one or both maps, but let's not count on that.
Harry LeGrand Raleigh
PS -- The existing 11 green tabs have not been affected. You can still get a checklist of all NC species and their ranks and statuses (using the Checklist tab), but Tom edited the format from previously. There are 11 pages that list all 502 species on all combined list categories.
