Friday, October 29, 2010

Unofficial NY City bird checklist

Faced with someone asking me for a NYC bird checklist, and failing once again to find any trace of one, I decided to construct my own at:
http://www.philjeffrey.net/NYC_unofficial_list.html

Which of course brings up the thorny subject of "what is a valid sighting". So I started with the NYC Audubon list, added in species that I knew were seen in recent years, and then added in yet more species from the NYSARC reports (1977 and later). This pushed the initial list of 344 up to 355, which is pretty close to the total I'd originally guessed.

Update: more work needs to be done - for example mining old Kingbird records - but the list total is now up to 367 (Nov 11th 2010).

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