This site focuses on these questions


Sept 13: WHITE-TAILED TROPICBIRD found in CT on Aug 28th! Read this fascinating story at Greg's site....

SEPT 10: CURRENTLY WORKING WITH THE eBIRD TEAM TO GET ALL HURRICANE BIRDS INTO eBIRD. PLEASE ENTER YOUR STORM-BIRDS INTO eBIRD THIS WEEK, OR CONTACT ME (robben99@gmail.com) OR MARSHALL ILIFF TO ASSIST.

This Hurricane Irene blog was meant to be helpful for just ONE WEEK to provide REAL-TIME reporting of ALL Atlantic coast storm-birds DURING the "teeth" of the storm, but the storm's winds and flooding killed our electricity and this blog. Without electricity, water and internet for 102 hours prevented us reporting during the most exciting part of the hurricane and its birding aftermath.
Instead of trying to "catch-up" and reconstruct those 102 missing hours from the archived listserv reports, we will instead 1) summarize them, 2) learn what we can from this "experiment" in real-time-hurricane-bird-blogging, 3) request eBird data entry of all hurricane reports, and 4) get ready for the NEXT hurricane this year!

Therefore we will refocus on the latest current map of the NEXT hurricanes and their projected storm tracks.....
Tropical Storms and Hurricanes (and the wind speed probabilities map... Wind Speed Projections ) and prepare again to answer these questions....
What impacts will the next hurricane have on birds on the East Coast of the USA (plus the western Atlantic and maritime Canada)? And how will that be reflected on the twenty main internet bird lists covering that region?

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Possible uses of blogs like this one

A REAL-TIME TOOL:

The primary objective of this blog was to be used DURING Hurricane Irene,  as a real-time communication tool, FOR JUST ONE WEEK ending on 8/31, to be useful to east coast birders to be more aware of the birding effects/opportunities/locations of Hurricane Irene, DURING Irene's approach and its immediate aftermath. Unfortunately we had a power outage which started at 11am Sunday and continues now 5pm Tuesday, including the crucial hours of Irene's main landfall, so that objective was compromised. 

A HISTORICAL TOOL:

Now that the hurricane is gone, and its effects are evaporating, we will try to use this blog to do a brief historical summary of Irene, but already the storm reports on the various state listservs are "rolling-off", and some of them will be hard to recover. We have just started to take daily snapshots of the main listservs, hoping to use them to assemble a comprehensive picture of all the hurricane birds of the past week.

To see the "rolling-off" problem you can click on some of the older links in this blog, and you will NOT be taken back to those particular reports (even though those links have the exact listserv ID numbers for those reports), but rather to the latest subset of reports on that listserv (because the older ones rolled-off, unfortunately). So these listservs are most useful during their current week (before the reports roll-off), but not as useful after the roll-off of the latest batch of reports (some listservs do archive but some dont). Some of this history is not archived. More thoughts on this next week, but meanwhile we will try to assemble a summary of "Irene's Birds" (assuming electricity returns soon).
Posted by Tom at 2:10 PM

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