Date: 9/1/26 3:08 pm From: Harry LeGrand (via carolinabirds Mailing List) <carolinabirds...> Subject: Re: The new-look Birds of North Carolina website
Wonderful! I just clicked on a few hawks, like Northern Goshawk and
Swainson's Hawk. Through 2024, there were no records of Swainson's showing
on the map west of Person, Durham, and Wake. But there was a 2025 fall
photo of one in Buncombe County, so hopefully that county will show up in
bright green with a newer "iteration" of the database.
I just checked the Birds of North Carolina website for Swainson's Hawk. As
expected, things are not going to completely "jive", as the text says for
the Piedmont there are just records for Wake County, Duke Forest
(presumably Durham County), and one in Orange County not reviewed by the
records committee. So, the website does not mention Person County, but the
generated map does. I just checked eBird now -- entering Swainson's Hawk
and North Carolina, to see the pins for all-time records. YES, there is a
pin in Person! Will Cook and Randy Emmitt saw one on 6 April 2006, which
was accepted. This didn't get picked up in the Chat Briefs for the Files,
perhaps. At any rate, for the rarer species, it will be important for me or
others to compare these eBird generated maps with text on the website. And, *in
a day or so I will add a mention of this Person County report on the
website.* I don't think it was ever reviewed by the records committee.
This is a good reason for some kind of editing capabilities for either Tom
Howard or myself, to add or delete counties from the maps, assuming these
roughly 500 maps make their way onto the species accounts. In addition,
Steve Shultz mentioned that on occasions, birds are seen/present in one
county but the observer was in an adjacent county when viewing the bird;
eBird lists are based on the county where the observer was, so if an
observer was in Granville County and saw a Hudsonian Godwit across a lake
in Wake County, the eBird report will show as Granville County when the
godwit was actually on the Wake County side.
First things first, though -- getting these maps onto the Birds of NC
website.
Harry LeGrand
On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 5:26 PM Goulden, Ivara June Benji <ijbg...>
wrote:
> Harry and all,
>
> Delighted that folks approve of the maps! Happy to help, Birds of North
> Carolina is a great website.
>
> Won't be any problem to make the maps for the rest of the ~500 species.
> After getting the wood-warblers done as an example, I updated the code so
> it can run through everything, and they're all up on github
> <https://github.com/IJBG/nc-ebird-maps/tree/main/maps> > <https://github.com/IJBG/nc-ebird-maps/tree/main/maps>now. One note is
> that the eBird data available on GBIF is through 2024, so for the most
> up-to-date info I'm waiting for my request to access the latest full eBird
> dataset to be approved.
>
> I've got thoughts on how to keep the maps updated with new eBird data or
> when someone submits a record on the website, implementation just depends
> on what the backend of BNC looks like. Maybe Tom, Kent, Allen and I can
> email to discuss and/or find a time to meet.
>
> Cheers,
> Ivara Goulden
> PhD Candidate | Hurlbert Lab, UNC-CH
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Harry LeGrand <hlegrandjr...>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, September 1, 2026 3:48 PM
> *To:* Hurlbert, Allen Hartley <Hurlbert...>
> *Cc:* carolinabirds listserve <carolinabirds...>; Goulden, Ivara
> June Benji <ijbg...>; Carpenter, John P <
> <john.carpenter...>; Anderson, Scott K. <
> <scott.anderson...>
> *Subject:* Re: The new-look Birds of North Carolina website
>
> You don't often get email from <hlegrandjr...> Learn why this is
> important <https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification> > Allen and all,
>
> WOW!!! I clicked on the rarer ones, knowing there would not be many
> county records for Kirtland's, Townsend's, etc. To my eyeballs, they look
> about right!
>
> And, Ivara even has the last year of occurrence into 10-year intervals, a
> double WOW!! Bachman's Warbler shows gray and just in Wake, as the two
> state records were 100 or more years ago.
>
> The next several stages seem to be:
>
> 1. completing the maps for all roughly 500 species in NC, which you or
> Ivara can get the checklist from the CBC website or the Birds of NC website
> (from the Checklist tab). As we see and you said, this is just the
> wood-warblers, including Western ones.
>
> 2. Hoping that either Kent Fiala (CBC webmaster) or Tom Howard (BNC
> webmaster) can figure out how to get the maps onto each of the 500 species
> account pages.
>
> 3. Adding the Enter Record type of input function back onto the BNC tabs
> list, and then testing that to make sure that when a birder submits a form
> with a species new to the county, along with a photo or description, and
> then when I vet it as Accepted, the new county will show on the map with a
> dark green color.
>
> NOTE: Even if all three of these do take place, we need to make sure the
> maps are not static. So, if we do get these maps onto the species account
> pages, when someone finds a species new to a county, say, in October 2026
> such as a Townsend's Warbler in Wilson County, and it is accepted into
> eBird, how will these new records get onto the species maps? Those green
> county maps we had were not updated with eBird or iNat records, and the
> only way they were updated was when someone entered a record onto a form on
> the BNC website, and I approved them. Thus, most maps were a bit out of
> date.
>
> Harry LeGrand
> primary author/editor of the Birds of North Carolina website
>
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 2:41 PM Hurlbert, Allen Hartley <
> <Hurlbert...> wrote:
>
> Hi Harry,
>
>
>
> Thanks to you and Tom Howard for all of the work you do on the Birds of
> North Carolina website.
>
>
>
> Glad to hear that you have recovered the species description text after
> the site crash.
>
>
>
> As for the county distribution maps, they are fairly easy to recreate. My
> PhD student Ivara Goulden pulled all of the bird observations for North
> Carolina from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which
> includes all eBird records as well as museum records.
>
>
>
> As a proof of concept, they created county maps for all of NC’s warbler
> species and put them in this shared Google Drive
> <https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rDuaPLL28Fw1TW1QFYcS22_mYyzJnHSO> > (assuming the listserv lets the link through). We are happy to create these
> maps for the rest of NC’s bird species if you find them useful!
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Allen Hurlbert
>
> Department of Biology
>
> University of North Carolina
>
> Director, *Caterpillars Count! <https://caterpillarscount.unc.edu/>* >
> Director, *NC Mini Breeding Bird Survey <https://minibbs.us/>* >
>
>
>
>
> *From:* <carolinabirds-request...> <carolinabirds-request...> *On
> Behalf Of *Harry LeGrand
> *Sent:* Friday, August 28, 2026 2:50 PM
> *To:* carolinabirds listserve <carolinabirds...>; Harry LeGrand <
> <hlegrandjr...>
> *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.
>
>
>
> Birds of North Carolina <https://ncbirds.carolinabirdclub.org/index.php> >
>
>
> 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.
>
>
