Date: 10/3/26 5:23 am From: Kent Fiala (via carolinabirds Mailing List) <carolinabirds...> Subject: eBird hotspot "About" pages
Last Spring, eBird introduced a wonderful and much-requested new feature, community-sourced hotspot descriptions. You can now find practical information about eBird hotspots online in eBird. Information includes How to plan your visit to the hotspot, how to bird the hotspot, and other general information about the hotspot. To find this information, open the hotspot's web page like always, and click on the new "About" link in the left-hand panel on a computer, or in the "Hotspot Navigation" pull-down on mobile.
But there's a catch: community-sourced means that the information is provided by the community, and that is you. If you look at the page for your favorite hotspot and find information lacking, then you need to write it. Share your local knowledge. Any logged-in eBirder can contribute content. On the About page, just click on the Suggest Content button, and begin editing. (If it's a hotspot with no information at all, you'll first need to set the Language to English before you can edit.) At the top of the edit page is a link labeled "Instructions" that takes you to a page talking about what to write here.
If you submitted more than 100 complete checklists in the previous calendar year, your edits are accepted immediately. Otherwise they are queued for review. A lot of Carolina hotspots have already been written up but I'd like to see a lot more. I'm posting this in hopes of encouraging more participation. It isn't necessary to produce a scholarly essay, even just a quick sketch of key information is helpful.
Here are two examples of hotspot write-ups. One illustrates a carefully researched, well-written report, and one is a quickly dashed-off sketch of just basic, but important, information. Both kinds of write-up have their place and are valuable.
