Getting information in sightings requires a certain amount of leg-work on the Web. I used to compile a
"Recent Interesting Sightings" post weekly on eBirdsNYC but the manual perusal of all those emails ended up
taking a prohibitive amount of time and it is currently discontinued. I'm working on an automatic method
to extract sightings from posts, but this is not without its challenges. I do have a couple of experimental
sightings aggregation pages (sightings.html, sightings2.html)
which pull all species mentioned out of the short-term list archives at birdingonthe.net, but this doesn't tag
the sightings with locations. Nevertheless, perusal of the lists and sites below should give you a good idea of
what is around.
NYC
NYC has two dedicated lists for its bird reports.
eBirds NYC started as a bird alert list as far back as 1996, and has gone through a number of incarnations.
Ben Cacace ran it from 1999 until 2004. Phil Jeffrey runs the latest version as a general sightings list,
re-started in 2004. NYSBirds-L also carries a lot of NYC reports although it is a state-wide list.
Metro Birding Briefs started in 2002 as a Yahoo group for rare bird sightings.
Lastly there is the web site nycbirdreport.com a general sightings clearinghouse
for a variety of NYC locations. The NYC RBA now appears online, after a prolonged absence, and can also
be reached by the more traditional phone at (212) 979 3070.
Email list aggregator via Yahoo pipes for
eBirdsNYC, NYSBirds-L, SINaturaList, BTBlue and the NJ lists - this is a clone of Ben Cacace's considerable update on my simple nycbirds1 list
Note that eBirds NYC is in no way affiliated or associated with Cornell's eBird project
- they just happen to share the same type of name (eBirdsNYC pre-dates eBird considerably).
NY State
New York State is unusual in that although there is a central New York State
Birds mailing list there's also a proliferation of other regional lists. There
is no state-wide RBA but a few regional ones. Some make it out to BIRDEAST, including
the NYC RBA which had not been posted online for some time but is now regularly posted
by Karen Fung and Ben Cacace.
Ralph T Waterman Rare Bird Alert
(Dutchess Co) often incorporates birds from a wider radius
New Jersey
Two email lists cover the state, with two RBAs posted to BIRDEAST and the state email lists: the
New Jersey RBA and the Cape May RBA. The Cape May Natural History Hotline RBA appears to have ceased.
The CT RBA started posting on BIRDEAST in March 2007 but appeared to cease in May 2007 after a brief life and has
resumed at best intermittently. It seems to turn up irregularly when interesting birds are in the state.
The April 2008 Ruff did not prompt its reappearance. There's also a daily roundup list and a general sightings list.
This is a relatively new RBA covering southeastern PA, central/southern NJ and the whole of DE. See
this link for a description of
the coverage area. The RBA overlaps other RBA areas, but is Philadelphia-centric. There's still a
Delaware RBA (check BIRDEAST for postings) but the older Philadelphia RBA seems to have ceased.
NARBA - North American Rare Bird Alert is a subscription service that
can funnel rare bird reports to you. I've not used this service so have no idea as to its effectiveness.
