And how could I forget the Willet split. Minnesota's species is now known
as the Prairie Willet.
Paul
*Paul Budde*
*<buddep...> <buddep...>*
On Thu, Oct 22, 2026 at 4:58 PM Paul Budde <buddep...> wrote:
> A few updates....
>
> 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.
>
> Paul
>
> *Paul Budde*
> *MOU Seasonal Reports Editor and Website Administrator*
> *<buddep...> <buddep...>*
>
