GET INVOLVED! TODAY!

eBird , a database project developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, managed in Quebec by QuébecOiseaux, offers you a simple way to keep track of the birds you see anywhere in the world. At any time, you can extract from it for personal purposes information concerning the birds that you have observed in your backyard, in your neighborhood or in your favorite observation places. You can also access all of the past information built into the database to find out what other eBird participants have reported from around the world. In addition, the eBird cumulative database is used by bird watchers, researchers and conservationists who want to learn more about the distribution and movement patterns of birds on the continent.

The eBird database that you are helping to create can be used by many people:

• you, to keep track of your personal sightings and keep lists of all the birds you have seen before or those that you have observed in a specific place or during a certain period; or to draw up lists of birds observed at various places and on certain dates from data provided by other observers;

• other ornithologists and amateur naturalists, to get to know the birds in your area;

• researchers, to discover bird movement patterns and distribution, including migratory routes, wintering and breeding grounds, arrival and departure dates, range expansions or contractions and crowds other important environmental relationships;

• conservationists, to identify areas of importance for birds based on their current distribution, as well as to monitor population trends and use them in the preparation of management plans for endangered, threatened or endangered species. peril;

• educators, who can use this cumulative database to educate their students about birds and scientific processes such as data collection, analysis and interpretation of results;

• everyone, to find out which species are resident throughout the year, which birds regularly frequent certain places, when a given species reaches or leaves its breeding or wintering grounds and much more.

Inspired by a Quebec initiative

When setting up eBird, its creators were inspired by ÉPOQ (Study of bird populations in Quebec), a database created in 1975 by the visionary ornithologist Jacques Larivée. Managed by QuébecOiseaux, ÉPOQ aimed to compile in digital format all the historical and recent mentions of birds in Quebec. In the years that followed, ornithologists in Quebec quickly adopted the reflex of filling out an ÉPOQ observation sheet at the end of their excursions. These sheets contained the list of some 300 bird species in Quebec and we could indicate the location of the excursion, the date, the start and end times of the excursion and of course the list of species observed including, for each of them, the number of individuals. ÉPOQ was completely replaced by eBird on March 1, 2014, after a few years of transition. When it closed, the ÉPOQ database contained 10,025,915 records of bird species.