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Birdaday Field Notes

Citizen science how-to

eBird for beginners: checklists and bar charts

eBird turns your bird lists into data researchers use, and gives back charts showing when and where each species turns up. This guide follows the eBird Help Center: setting up, choosing a checklist type, counting, then using bar charts and Explore pages to plan. If you are brand new to birding, start with how to start birding.

Quick read

One checklist = one location, one calendar date, one observation type.

Birding on purpose? Use Stationary (within about 100 ft) or Traveling. Not? Use Incidental.

Complete = every species you identified by sight or sound, which is what powers eBird's bar charts and Status and Trends.

Step 1: Set up

  1. Make a free Cornell Lab account. The same login works for Merlin Bird ID, Bird Academy, Project FeederWatch and the Great Backyard Bird Count, where any checklist you submit during the four February count days counts toward the event.
  2. Pick how you will submit. Use the eBird.org website or the free eBird Mobile app. The Help Center calls the app the most popular option: it keeps a running list offline, times your outing and helps measure distance.
  3. Optional: take eBird Essentials. It is a free, self-paced Bird Academy course of five lessons, with nine videos totaling 21 minutes and an estimated 3 hours to finish.

Step 2: Choose the checklist type

eBird calls the observation type a protocol and asks you to pick the one that best describes how you birded. Beginners need only the four core types.

Type Use it when Effort you enter
Stationary Birding was your main focus and you stayed within about 100 ft (30 m) of where you started Start time and duration
Traveling Birding was your main focus and you moved more than 100 ft (30 m) Start time, duration and distance
Incidental Birding was not the main focus: gardening, reading, a hawk seen from the car None; "complete" is set to No
Historical Birding was the focus but you don't know the start time, duration or distance Date, plus whatever you know

Distance is unique distance. Count trail you walked twice only once. In eBird's example, a 0.45 km trail, a 0.3 km loop and the same 0.45 km back add up to 1.2 km walked, but you enter 0.75 km. With tracks running in eBird Mobile, the app records distance and time for you, and it sets Stationary automatically if you stay in one spot.

Turn incidental sightings into counts. Incidental lists lack effort, so they are less useful for science. If a Golden Eagle flies over, eBird suggests birding for about five minutes and submitting a 5-minute Stationary count. eBird also says plainly: don't eBird while driving.

Step 3: Keep the effort honest

Start a new checklist when you change location or major habitat, switch between stationary and traveling, stay put for more than an hour, or travel more than a mile. eBird's tip is to keep Traveling lists under 5 miles (8 km) and Stationary lists under 3 hours, and says lists under 1 hour or 1 mile are more precise still. If you are not using tracks, put a traveling checklist's location near the middle of the route, in habitat typical of where you birded.

Step 4: Count the birds

Include Leave out
Birds seen or heard and confidently identified Eggs, dead birds and captive birds (pets, zoo collections, falconry birds)
Fledglings and nestlings Birds seen only on nest cams, feeder cams or trail cams
Free-flying introduced species, such as House Sparrows and European Starlings Zero counts: leaving a species off a complete list already means zero
Only your own observations Other people's sightings, or photos from other dates or places

Step 5: Complete or incomplete?

A checklist is complete when "every species you could identify to the best of your ability, by sight and/or sound, is reported." You don't have to identify every bird; unknowns can go in as "spuh" or "slash" entries. A list is incomplete if you deliberately left out species you identified: only the highlights, no introduced species, or no heard-only birds.

Answer honestly, because only complete checklists show which species you did not find. eBird says that is as useful as knowing where birds were, and only complete checklists power eBird Status and Trends and the frequency figures in bar charts.

Step 6: Submit

In eBird Mobile:

  1. Check the date and start time, keep Record Tracks on, and tap Start checklist.
  2. Set the location by tapping the pin at the top. You can't submit without one.
  3. Add each species and its count; Quick Entry needs only four letters of the name.
  4. Tap Stop. With tracks on, protocol, distance and duration fill in.
  5. Set the number of observers, share with companions, and answer whether you are reporting all species.
  6. Tap Submit. With no signal, the list waits under "Not Submitted".

On eBird.org:

  1. Click Submit in the top menu and find your location on the map.
  2. Enter Date and Effort: date, start time, distance, duration and observation type.
  3. Enter a count, or an X, for each species. Use "Show Rarities" or "+ Add Species" if a bird isn't listed.
  4. Answer "Are you submitting a complete checklist of the birds you were able to identify?"
  5. Submit within 60 minutes, because the page times out. Fix mistakes later under Manage My Checklists.

Step 7: If a sighting is flagged

Regional filters, set by volunteer experts, check every record's species, count, place and date. "Any report that exceeds expected totals for a given species at a location on a given date gets 'flagged'," usually a rarity, an out-of-season bird or a high count. If you see "Needs Details", don't delete the bird or lower the count. Recount if you need to, and add notes, photos or sound, including how you ruled out look-alikes; "seen well" is not enough.

A volunteer reviewer then checks the record and may email you. Accepted records go public; those without enough support are marked "Unconfirmed" and stay visible only to you. Reviewers can't change your data, only whether the public sees it. Review can take a week or two.

Plan with bar charts

Open Bar Charts from the main Explore page, or from the link on any region or hotspot page. Each bar shows frequency: the share of complete checklists from that area that report the species for that week of the year. A frequency of 0.4 means the bird is on 40% of complete checklists.

Bar height Frequency Share of complete checklists
9 (tallest) 0.6–1.0 60–100%
8 0.4–<0.6 40–60%
7 0.3–<0.4 30–40%
6 0.2–<0.3 20–30%
5 0.1–<0.2 10–20%
4 0.05–<0.1 5–10%
3 0.01–<0.05 1–5%
2 0.003–<0.01 0.3–1%
1 (narrowest) >0–<0.003 under 0.3%
Empty gray box 0 not reported
How to read one row of an eBird bar chartA schematic row of weekly cells from January to December for one invented species. January to March and November to December show empty gray boxes. Bars appear in April as a very thin bar, grow to the tallest height in May and June, stay tall through summer and shrink through September and October. A vertical line marks late October as the current date. Below, a key shows the nine bar heights from 1, the narrowest, to 9, the tallest.One species row, Jan to DecInvented pattern for a summer visitor, not real dataJFMAMJJASOND12345Bar-height key123456789
  1. Empty gray box: no reports of the species in that period.
  2. Narrowest bar (1): on fewer than 0.3% of complete checklists, so rarely reported then.
  3. Middle bar (5): on 10 to 20% of complete checklists.
  4. Tallest bar (9): on 60% or more of complete checklists, when the species is most likely to be found.
  5. Vertical line: the current date, which eBird marks on the chart.
Drawing: Birdaday Field Notes, following the bar-height bins and the current-date line described in the eBird Help Center article on bar charts (sources below). The species pattern is invented for illustration; not eBird data, and not eBird's exact layout.

On the chart you can change the region or date range, click a species for its page, click the map icon for its reports, or open line graphs to compare several species, or one species over up to 5 separate years. "Download Histogram Data" gives the raw frequencies.

Other Explore tools for planning

Tool What it does
Explore Regions Summaries for counties, states and countries (not towns or cities): species lists, recent visits, top eBirders
Explore Hotspots Species lists, illustrated checklists and recent visits for popular birding sites
Species Maps Where a species has been reported; zoom in to see single sightings
Targets Species you haven't recorded for a region and range of months, sortable by frequency
Alerts Rare Bird Alerts and Needs Alerts from the past 7 days, by daily or hourly email if you subscribe

Alerts can include records not yet reviewed; accepted ones are marked CONFIRMED. A 2016 eBird article by Sarah Toner suggests a planning routine: list the expected species for a region, add the special birds from Alerts, then pick hotspots whose bar charts show your targets at that season. For a Bird-a-Day streak, the species planner turns those months into a hit list.

Before you submit

Sources