It’s time to announce the winner of our February Atlas challenge!
The February challenge was a grid square themed challenge, with the goal of submitting to as many grid squares as possible in order to try increase the Summer season grid square coverage before it ended.
From over 7,700 checklists uploaded to the Atlas portal in February 2024, covering 991 grid squares and racking up an impressive 2,900 hours of effort across the country by the Atlas community – well done everyone!
We randomly selected Richard Schofield from the 133 Atlasers who qualified for this challenge. Richard submitted a total of 261 checklists detailing 123 species to the Atlas eBird portal during February, which included submitting checklists to 150 Atlas Grid Squares many of which had little effort in previously. All of these observations were submitted as part of complete checklists, with accurate abundances for all species, greatly increasing his chances of winning. Richard has continued to put in a massive amount of time and effort in to gathering valuable Atlas observations throughout the project, as well as being the Otago Atlas coordinator, and volunteer eBird reviewer for the Otago region. We are very excited to announce Richard as the winner, so please join us in congratulating him! Richard has won a free pass to one of the Bird Academy courses listed below.
During February one lucky Atlaser was able to win a 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
Congratulations to all those who participated in February, we do have more challenges on the way so keep your eyes peeled on the News and Facebook pages!
As usual, we asked Richard some questions below as our next Atlaser Profile.
Can you tell us a bit about your background, how long you have been birding and what first got you interested in birds? Christmas 1973 (ouch!) a neighbour bought us a board game based around bird conservation. My best friend at the time was interested in birds, and from then on it just seemed the natural thing to do. In the early days I cycled around (even then) seeing as many birds as possible in my local area, near Liverpool; then I joined the British Trust for Ornithology, and got involved in various surveys, including a winter and a breeding atlas, regular wader counts on Morecambe Bay, waterfowl counts in the Lake District, and species-specific surveys. I moved to New Zealand in 2001, joined Birds NZ (OSNZ as it was known then) straight away, and jumped straight into fieldwork for the 1999-2004 Atlas.
How long have you been using eBird?
I first started using eBird in about 2011, but being a bit adverse to technology I didn’t fully convert fully until 2017.
How have you liked the current Atlas project?
As the coordinator for Otago, it can get a bit stressful looking at the map and seeing all the squares that still need coverage, so what I really like about it is getting out to some out-of-the-way places, and relax by just looking (and listening) for birds.
How did you enjoy the Atlas challenge? Did you have any highlights?
Towards the end of the month, I was trying to cover some squares on the south side of Lake Wakatipu, near Queenstown. I travelled over from Mavora Lakes, where I’d been trying to visit for the last 20 years, and came into the headwaters of the Oreti River, where I was greeted with a wonderful panoramic vista.
How valuable do you feel the Atlas is going to be for bird conservation and research in Aotearoa New Zealand?
There is so much information in there it is going to be indispensable for anybody who needs to know what is where.
Do you have any standout Atlasing moments so far?
How about the covey of Chukar running along the road by Lake Aviemore, and then just blending into the bank.
What are your hopes post-Atlas for NZ birds and the birding community?
I’d like to think that people will continue to use eBird on a regular basis, so that we can continue to see changes in distribution and population, hopefully more positive than negative.
We are very grateful to the Bird Academy team for kindly donating this prize for our challenge. Please do keep your eyes peeled on our News page, Facebook or Instagram, to learn how you can win some fantastic prizes just by Atlasing.
There was an impressive final push to end the Summer season strongly by the whole Atlas community. Some impressive data collected and more will be summarised at the upcoming BirdsNZ Conference in Nelson.
Thank you as always for continuing to Atlas across the country. Not long left now!
Happy Atlasing!