Slightly delayed in getting this one out to you all after the long weekend, but we’re excited to announce April’s Atlas challenge!
Just 9 weeks are left now, as we continue the final countdown continues before the Atlas finishes.
April marks the second month of the final Autumn season, and the penultimate month before the Atlas finishes. The Atlas team want to continue to encourage the Atlas community to be trying to gather observations in as many low effort grid squares as possible before the season ends, especially at night!
⏹️ With that in mind, the April Atlas challenge is nocturnal grid-square related, and we have our final free pass to give away for one of the Bird Academy courses listed below!
During April one lucky Atlaser will win the final free access pass to select one of the following Bird Academy online courses:
1. How to Photograph Birds with Melissa Groo
2. The wonderful world of Owls
3. Understanding Bird Behaviour
To qualify, all you have to do is submit complete nocturnal checklists to grid squares that have had no nocturnal effort so far year round in the Atlas eBird portal. Each unique grid square on this list that you enter nocturnal data into gives you one entry into the draw. So if you submit data to five grid squares that have had no year-round nocturnal effort, your name goes in five times. Remember your checklists must include counts for every species reported (no X’s!) and should follow the best practices outlined here. If you don’t hear any species, that is still valuable data, so please do submit those lists!
A list of all those grid squares that had no nocturnal effort year round as of 1st April 2024, can be found here for reference.
️ The easiest way is to check out the Atlas Effort Map and find those grid squares with no nocturnal effort. There are over 1,600 of these that you can help gather nocturnal bird observations in!
The winner will be randomly drawn from everyone who qualifies and announced at the beginning of May.
Many thanks again to the legends at Bird Academy for kindly donating this prize for a lucky Atlaser to win. It is hugely appreciated!
There has been some impressive Autumn Atlasing by the community to get more data into more Atlas grid squares and we wish to encourage you all to keep up that amazing effort for just a bit longer. Below shows the current stats as of today for the Autumn season. Can you help us fill in the gaps?
