Project ParkWatch: Central Node

As part of an effort to describe and to chronicle the avifauna of the Upper Cumberland Region of Kentucky and Tennessee, my wife and I want to be sure that all the parks and other public access birding sites in the Region are cited and that as many of these sites as possible are provided with a comprehensive checklist of the birds occurring within them.  To these ends, Project ParkWatch is being initiated in January 2005.

    To see if a particular park or other public access birding site is part of our information base, please check the page of this website that deals with public access birding sites in your county, accessible via links at this page of the website:

Any park, no matter how small, is of interest to us, including small parks in towns and cities.  Any other public access birding sites are also of interest.  It is only necessary that these sites be open to the public and maintained by a municipal, county, state, or federal government agency.  If you know of a park or other public site that is not part of our base of information, please send us a message about the site at either of these addresses:

   Besides creating a comprehensive survey of all Regional parks and public birding sites, we also want to try to create a bird checklist for each.  Some of these checklists have already been initiated; others probably exist, but we do not know about them; still others remain on the drawing board.

   Interested birders may participate in ParkWatch in several ways.  Besides alerting us to the presence of parks as yet unknown to us, birders can initiate bird checklists in parks without such lists or add to the bird species on existing checklists.  Either of these options will entail making visits to one or more parks, either occasionally as you have time and opportunity or regularly if you can do that.  The best results will occur if you make your visits over a fairly lengthy period of time (i. e, at least a year).  If you have the time and inclination to make such a commitment, then you may select from a variety of methods to accomplish this goal.

   The simplest method is to make visits whenever you can and note the species you see.  If a checklist for a park already exists, simply keep track of the first date when you see a species not on the checklist and report those species and the dates you observed them; if a checklist for a park does not exist, then start one, by noting the date of the first time you encounter each species observed. There is no need to keep any other data if you use this most simple of all data collection methods.

   You can increase the value of your visits to parks by keeping daily checklists of the species you encounter on your visits.  These can be simple checklists without numbers for each species, or they can include the numbers of individuals observed for each species; if the latter method is used, then keep track of effort (time afield, including beginning and ending times in the park) and weather conditions (sky conditions; wind; and temperature).

   Finally, you can increase the value of your visits to parks even more by making your visits as uniform as possible with regard to when and how long you make each visit and where you go during each visit.  If you visit a park during the same part of the day, take approximately the same amount of time, and cover exactly the same driving or walking route in the park during each visit, the resulting data will have greater value than data collected in a less uniform manner.

   If you decide to proceed using the data collection method just described, you can further increase the value of the collected data by archiving them using the eBird data entry program.  To see an example of how data can be used if the methodology in the preceding paragraph is followed and if the resulting data are archived in eBird, go to one of these links:

To see an example of a bird checklist derived largely from data collected during the course of a decade, go to this link:

    Barb and I hope that many birders in the Upper Cumberland Region will decide to take part in ParkWatch.  If you are one of them, please let us know, share your bird data, and look for them to appear on pages of this website devoted to checklists of birds (links to appear below eventually).  The birds residing in the parks and other public access birding sites of our Region deserve to be as well known and as well documented as possible.  Thanks for any assistance you can provide with this project.

   Here are the names of Regional observers who have participated in ParkWatch since January 2005; the park or other site they have covered is also listed (each underlined park name is linked to a checklist for the site, but not all sites yet have checklists):

Quick links to other sections of this website:

• HomePage for SJS

• The BirdPage

• The ButterflyPage