The American Ornithological Society finally published the 67th Supplement to its checklist on 10/20. This will eventually result in changes of names that we use on our website once they update all of their files. Changes you will see include the new names Hudsonian Whimbrel (currently Whimbrel), American Egret (Great Egret), and Eastern Marsh-Wren (Marsh Wren). While there was talk of renaming the Yellow Warbler as Northern Yellow Warbler, that did not happen. There are also some changes to a few scientific names and some taxonomic re-ordering. It may be winter before these updates appear, depending on how fast the AOS can release the full checklist files.
Speaking of winter, it's now cold enough that the link to the Minnesota Christmas Bird Count home page is listed under our Quick Links. Steve Weston and I have been discussing a few tweaks to make these pages easier for participants to use. The big change we envision is a facility for circle compilers to create a list of birds and counts for their circle by uploading one or more ebird checklists. This will work well for circles in which each sector produces a complete checklist. Whether or not to use this feature is up to each compiler to decide.
Anthony Hertzel has written a history of the early bird clubs that led to the formation of the Minnesota Ornithologists' Union. It's complete with photographs of significant leaders of these clubs and club logos. You'll find it on the website under MOU, Administration, and Contacts > History of the MOU > Early History of the MOU.
We've also been making a number of small edits to the website to improve user experience. Perhaps the most notable change of this type is the map of Minnesota counties colored by a user's species total for each county. You can see it at My MOU Account > My Checklists > By County. Look at the bottom of this page. We've changed the color gradient used and defaulted to seven ranges of counts (50 each). More importantly, we've also given you the capability to change those ranges. Click on "Create Individual Ranges" to play with it. You can always delete what you've created, change it, or just go back to the default ranges.
Finally, this morning around 12:16 - 12:18 AM CDT our website was inundated by a lot of automated activity. This resulted in some users being unable to make server connections to complete tasks on the website as we hit the maximum number of connections we could have. I went online with our hosting provider to discuss the problem, and was informed that they were doing a very large security update today. I don't know that that had anything to do with our issue, but it might have. These things happen occasionally, though it's been a few months since the last episode. These episodes usually don't last very long, so if you ever experience this sort of trouble, it's probably best to go get a cup of coffee or tea and come back to the website in a few minutes.
