I would like to thank all who replied to my eBird question. Some replied to the entire listserve, others just to me. Here is my analysis of all suggestions - hope it is useful. I also found a non-eBird product that may help a number of people - see last suggestion of this email.
I think the best solution is for eBird to replace the “Summarize My Observations” feature as promised. As eBird posted many months ago, "If you are looking for Summarize My Observations, please stay tuned for a new checklist summary tool in the coming year—we are modernizing the tool in a way that’ll make it even better than before.” While waiting for eBird to decide if and when to develop this new feature: Several birders (Joe Fell, Alan Wells, Adelia Honeywood) suggested downloading each checklist as a .csv and combining them in Excel, sorting them, and totaling on species. Another (Arie Gilbert) suggested Avisys. These are both time and effort-consuming solutions for something that used to take a couple of keystrokes. Their use by some birders reflects that eBird is very good at collecting data but not adequate in retrieving it! There are three suggestions that are especially useful for the CBC, which needs expeditious production of a trip summary with species totals. The first was described in detail by Brendan Fogarty and referred to by Joshua Malbin. Use the mobile app feature “Trip Summary” (first select the Checklists icon). Use the TODAY option to email yourself the trip summary. WARNING: This will retrieve only checklists submitted by that one device! Any checklists shared to you will not be shown. Anything done on the website is not shown, even corrections to a checklist that you submitted via the device. If you sign in a second device to the same account, the two lists of sightings are NOT combined. The second suggestion was described in detail by Brent Bomkamp and referred to by Noah Strycker. Use the website feature of My Ebird--Sightings List, then change the date range to the single CBC day. This gives a list of all the species seen, but not how many of each. Clicking on “View All” for a species gives you a total number of individuals (next to the green # of observations) that you need to write down. Then, go back to the species list for the day, and repeat this for each species (This is time-consuming, and prone to transcribing errors.) This solution will retrieve all of the day’s data for a user id, regardless of how it was entered or whether it was shared. So groups using a “collective” id may collaborate their sightings. Another useful suggestion was by Andrew Baksh: view and post on the “eBird Community Discussion Group” on Facebook. I noticed a posting from Sept 1: Birder Kent Fiala developed a website tool called the eBird Checklist compiler (use at your own risk). It worked for me - I just had to Unprotect the Excel sheet to get the totals. It would be nice to have an official eBird product that has the same function; it would eliminate the setting up of ad hoc group “user i.d.s” to combine data just for one use. https://www.faintlake.com/eBird/compiler/?fbclid=IwAR1RECMhhi2Q4H3E3SETW25FlScF-00RVq1v9d1qF9WubLjqHsWgmpV8Vnw Hope all of this is useful. Nancy Tognan [email protected] ---------------- Begin forwarded message: From: Nancy Tognan <[email protected]> Subject: EBird eliminated "Summarize my Observations" - problem for Christmas Bird Count Date: October 12, 2020 at 12:31:42 PM EDT To: NYS Birds listserve <[email protected]> I contacted eBird via their website on August 23, 2020 re the following complaint. There has been no response. EBird used to have the function “Summarize My Observations”, which has now been eliminated. It was useful to produce a combined trip list of multiple locations. It was especially useful for the Christmas Bird Count. My North Nassau CBC sector includes 19 locations (each a separate spot to drive to). In years past, I could produce a combined checklist in about 2 minutes using “Summarize My Observations”. Now what? Print 19 checklists and combine the data by hand? This may take two hours instead of two minutes. I would like to have seen “Summarize My Observations” be improved to allow more flexible dates and selection of locations. Instead, the whole feature is gone - did eBird ask anyone before deleting it? I feel that birders spend a lot of effort inputting their data - shouldn’t eBird give us a better interface to inquire on it? Does the loss of this feature bother anyone else or just me? By the way, these other features were also deleted: species All-Time First/Last Records, Arrivals and Departures, and High Counts. Nancy Tognan -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
