[obol] archives?

[Joel Geier]

Hello folks,

Here's an attempt to answer some of the questions that were raised by
Paul Sullivan in yesterday's OBOL digest:

> 0. How would one go about searching for a past sighting of a bird in
> Oregon? Say, a Masked Whatsit wintering in Umatilla county in 1988?

For birds such as Masked Whatsits that are state-level rarities and were
reported to the Oregon Bird Records Committee (OBRC), you can find past
records either by doing a text search on the OBRC page of the Oregon
Field Ornithologists (OFO) website:

http://www.oregonbirds.org/obrc.html (last updated 2006, I think a new
version is pending from OBRC)

or by searching the database on www.birdnotes.net (has all older records
but is missing the last 2 or 3 OBRC updates).

For county-level rarities which are not OBRC-level rarities (e.g.
Pacific-slope Whatsits in Umatilla County), some but not all that were
reported either in /Oregon Birds/ or /North American Birds/ field notes
are on birdnotes (thanks in large part to Craig Miller's personal
compilation of county-level rarities).

For birds that were not reported to the OBRC or field notes editors --
good luck!

> 1. I know individual birders keep lists of birds they've seen.  Some
> folks have lists of first arrivals, nesting, first sightings, etc,
> from other observers.

Some of those individuals have posted their observations on birdnotes,
but it's a minority. Some folks have used software such as Avisys, which
should be easier to port over to web databases since at least the data
are in digital form. For searching the truly "shoebox" sources, again,
good luck!! 

> 2. Oregon Birds, the journal, has printed records going back to 1975.

OFO has within the last year received a proposal from the OSU Valley
Library to start digitizing back issues of Oregon Birds, as pdf and text
files which will then be searchable. Apparently this is a new initiative
at OSU and /Oregon Birds/ would be one of their first projects, so it
may take some time.

The most recent few years' of /Oregon Birds/ are already in pdf format
so could be placed on the web fairly easily.

In the last couple of years, OFO has gone to a database-friendly format
for regional field notes compilations, see:

http://www.oregonbirds.org/FieldNotes/FieldNotesStatewide.html

for what's currently available.

> 3. The Oregon Birds Records Committee has records of rare birds going
> back a bit farther.

"A bit farther" would be at least to 1871 (a record of a Nuttall's
Woodpecker, perhaps there are older records in there). The older records
are all accessible via both www.oregonbirds.org and www.birdnotes.net.

> 4. The OBOL archive doesn't begin until Dec. 1999.
> What happened to the archives of the first 5-9 years of OBOL?

When did OBOL start, 1996 or so? I think 1999 was when the OSU listservs
switched their software to the current version.  I don't know what's
become of the older digests, perhaps Greg Gillson might know.

> 5. How far back does Birdnotes.net go?

Rarity records in www.birdnotes.net go back as far as the OBRC records
(so at least to 1871). The service became available for regular data
entry in 1998, so most nonrarity reports are from thereafter, but some
people have typed in older records from their notebooks. In Wallowa
County, Ralph Anderson has typed in a huge amount of old USFS data that
were sitting around in a file drawer.

> 6. The Breeding Bird Atlas covers 5 years in the middle of the 1990's.

... and is still available from the OFO Bookcase if anyone wants to
order a copy:

http://www.oregonbirds.org/books.html#Publications

> What happened to the Coot Project?

Matt Hunter took down this website when he no longer had time to
maintain it. I can't recall the final disposition of the archives -- if
Matt still has them or they wound up with OFO.

> Folks were compiling OBOL sightings by county is a web-accessible data
> base, but is that effort still alive?

This seems to be a reference to an appeal for volunteers that I put out
for such a project, after I wrote some Linux-based software that greatly
simplifies the job. 

We never got enough volunteers to make that happen. A few people who
were willing to help were unfortunately not equipped for Linux and
thought it would be too much hassle to install, and it would have
required a major effort for me to port the code over to Windows. 

I've translated parts of the OBOL digest for the past 5 or 6 years over
into this format (at least back to 2003 on this laptop, and I have older
processed records on another computer).

Below is a sample of how these records come out (in comma-separated
values format, which most spreadsheets and databases can deal with --
note that my e-mail composer has split the records into multiple lines
here). It appears that someone had a nice field trip to Summer Lake in
August, 2003 but did not find any Masked Whatsits.
--
[from source file obol0308.csv]
GENERAL NOTE,,16 Aug 2003,Lake,Summer Lake,Paul T. Sullivan,"12
participants survived the heat and enjoyed
the birds at Summer Lake, Ft. Rock, and Cabin Lake C.G. on the Audubon
Birding Weekend, Aug. 16-17. We tallied 123 species."
Trumpeter Swan,1,16 Aug 2003,Lake,Summer Lake,Paul T. Sullivan,"- at the
far end of Gold Dike"
Snow Goose,1,16 Aug 2003,Lake,Summer Lake,Paul T. Sullivan,"- at the far
end of Gold Dike"
Bald Eagle,1 adult,16 Aug 2003,Lake,Summer Lake,Paul T. Sullivan,"- Hwy
31 near Harvey Rd."
Swainson's Hawk,1,16 Aug 2003,Lake,,Paul T. Sullivan,"- Paisley"
Ferruginous Hawk,2,16 Aug 2003,Lake,,Paul T. Sullivan,"- Ft. Rock"
Peregrine Falcon,1,16 Aug 2003,Lake,Summer Lake,Paul T. Sullivan,"-
Windbreak Dike"
Snowy Plover,30,16 Aug 2003,Lake,Summer Lake,Paul T. Sullivan,"- near
Schoolhouse Lake."
Semipalmated Plover,4,16 Aug 2003,Lake,Summer Lake,Paul T. Sullivan,"-
near Schoolhouse Lake"
Semipalmated Sandpiper,none,16 Aug 2003,Lake,Summer Lake,Paul T.
Sullivan
...
Sage Thrasher,many,16 Aug 2003,Lake,,Paul T. Sullivan,"- scattered
everywhere"
Green-tailed Towhee,1,16 Aug 2003,Lake,,Paul T. Sullivan,"- on road up
to Fremont Point"
Green-tailed Towhee,1,16 Aug 2003,Lake,,Paul T. Sullivan,"- came in and
took a bath at the water spigot in
the picnic area at Ft. Rock St. Pk."
--

After I was unsuccessful in getting volunteers who could help with this
project, I gradually limited my focus to the Willamette Valley and
Corvallis areas where I had field notes responsibilities. So for later
years, my set of converted files are less complete.

Now that Linux has gotten a lot easier to install, perhaps it's worth
trying again for volunteers. The software still works fine. It takes
about 4 to 8 hours to work through a month's worth of OBOL digests
(depending on the level of posting activity).

Thanks for asking about the situation with old records. I'm sure that
many Oregon birders would love to have an integrated, instantly
searchable database at their fingertips, but it takes either volunteer
time or cash to make this happen. 

For example, to convert 8 years of the digests back to 1999 would take
15 volunteers about one week's worth of effort apiece. If OFO were to,
say, pay a student intern $15/hr to do the data crunching, the cost
would be roughly $8500. 

I'd like to think that this could still be done with volunteers. I'd be
happy to work with anyone who's willing to install Linux on their home
computer, in order to help out by crunching a few months' worth of
digests.

Happy searching,
Joel

--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis