Date: 9/10/26 8:18 am From: Harry LeGrand (via carolinabirds Mailing List) <carolinabirds...> Subject: The breeding abundance county maps have been returned to the Birds of North Carolina website
Folks,
The Birds of NC webmaster, Tom Howard, has taken the file that Kent Fiala, the Carolina Bird Club webmaster, was able to save when the BNC website went down over a month ago. This file contained hopefully all of the red-dot maps for each species that breeds in NC. Thus, you can now see each of the 180-200 maps of the species that breed or have bred in the state.
Now, for the caveats. We seem to have lost the files that allowed me to edit these maps, such as adding a county to the map, or changing the breeding abundance level. Recall that these abundance levels are ones that I assigned a decade or two ago, based solely on my experience with the breeding ranges of the species and how common or rare each is across the state. So, the size of the red dots have always been rough approximations. As a result, *these maps are now static, as of around 2024, and cannot or will not likely be updated.* At least, the text is updated quarterly. It is hoped that such breeding maps could be replaced by the NC Bird Atlas maps, but it is best not to supersede that important website database; instead, perhaps each species account page might have a link to that species' map on the NC Bird Atlas website. These choices are down the road, as the NC Wildlife Resources Commission is currently editing, vetting, and cleaning up those NC Bird Atlas breeding maps, as certainly there is misleading data on those maps right now.
Lastly, you should know that Tom Howard *has* been able to upload eBird county distribution maps just to me (and possibly to Kent) for review, and they look great. However, as I perhaps have mentioned here earlier, there are some mismatches in common or scientific names, and I believe some of the maps were thus not able to be uploaded on my Edit view. In addition, there are also issues of not using such eBird maps that are hosted on a personal website, as well as currently not being able to figure out how to update these maps. We don't want static maps, even though they could probably be regenerated completely at the end of each season, or end of each year, for example. So -- for now -- you will *not *be seeing the eBird maps on the species accounts. NOTE: Several individuals did post to carolinabirds listserve active links to these maps.
