Date: 9/22/26 12:19 pm From: Harry LeGrand (via carolinabirds Mailing List) <carolinabirds...> Subject: Filling in "high count" holes on the Birds of North Carolina website
will have noticed that for many species and provinces, such as Pied-billed Grebe, Wood Duck, and many other common species,I do not have anything after "Peak counts:". This is because I could not locate such notably high counts in Chat Briefs or other available sites. I suspect before eBird came along, most peak (daily) counts were made by multiple parties on Spring Bird Counts or Christmas Bird Counts, and there is not an easy way to glean 75 years of Chats to locate high counts.
But, this morning, I mentioned a need for me to fill in these blanks on the website, and Michael Fogleman came through again! A week or two ago, he generated eBird maps for all NC species (as did one or two others of you), and Tom Howard (the BNC webmaster) posted them a few days ago. A few species maps are missing (see below). Today, Michael sent me, Tom, and David Campbell two* csv files that contain the top 10 all-time daily counts for each of the 500+ species, as generated from eBird data!! And, he ALSO sent us a csv file for SC's species as well. * Now, this listserve does NOT allow attachments, and so we cannot attach these csv files, Excel files, Word files, jpg files, etc. *Thus, please reply to me and I can forward them on to you, already converted to Excel format. (Each is about 650 KB in size.)*
If you are curious, the all-time high count in NC for Wood Duck (on a single eBird list) is 1570, Orton Pond, Brunswick County, 12 January 2022. And the alltime high count for any species in NC (on an eBird list only) is 1,000,000 Red-winged Blackbirds. I do know for sure that in the last century, there were higher one-day counts for Common Grackles, maybe Red-winged Blackbird, and probably Starlings.
I have a few other computer tasks to do, but hopefully in a week or two I can start filling in the high counts for these species in the 3 provinces. Certainly, some will remain blank, as the generated file is just the top 10 for the state, and in some cases these might all be in in the Coastal Plain, for example.
Harry LeGrand Birds of North Carolina website
PS -- species with missing maps: Passenger Pigeon, Lesser Nighthawk, Cypseloides swift, Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Gyrfalcon, Carolina Parakeet, Pine Grosbeak, Long-eared Owl, and Black Rail. The last was removed as the eBird data were very incomplete. The rail and owl are Sensitive Species and thus eBird data for mapping are not available. I HAVE gone through the Chat database on the Carolina Bird Club website to create an Excel file, plus the info on the species accounts, to provide Tom and Michael with the necessary county and last year date for nearly all of the others. But, the trick is to produce these 9 maps in a format that either matches or is similar enough to the existing eBird maps. That will likely be difficult, but any kind of county map would be helpful as soon as feasible.
