Subject: [Tweeters] Washington county year list project 2007 summary report
Date: Jan 27 19:28:14 2008
From: mattxyz at earthlink.net - mattxyz at earthlink.net


Hi Tweeters & INWBers -
I've been meaning to send out a summary of the 2007 county list
project, but kept putting it off. Now, with January almost gone, I'm
finally getting to it. As a bonus(?), I'll send another message soon
with info about the 2008 version of the same.

As you've seen on our lists, in 2007 a group of us worked together to
keep track of the bird sightings across every county in Washington.
While individual county listing is fun, the idea behind this project
was to try to keep track of the 'community' list: all the birds seen
by anyone, rather than just those seen by one person. The result is
something of a picture of the birds of Washington for 2007. Every
county had a brave compiler who was tasked with keeping track of any
reports they saw from 'their' county. For some counties like King,
where reports come in fast & furious on Tweeters every day, this is a
pretty easy process. But for others where birders are more rare, it
took more work to learn of sightings of the more regular birds. Every
month or two, I would ask all the compilers to send me their updated
lists. I'd pull them all together into a state list.

Anyway, here are some results:

Overall, for the state we recorded 399 species -- That's above an
estimate I did last year of 390 species seen state-wide. We recorded
365 species in Western WA, and 332 species in Eastern WA. All three
of these totals represent about 81-82% of all species ever recorded
in those areas.

The counties with the highest totals recorded were:
Grays Harbor: 278
King : 270
Okanogan: 267
Clallam: 258
Walla Walla: 256
Yakima: 252
Snohomish: 251
Whatcom: 250
Skagit: 250
Grant: 245

Since some counties have larger possible species than others , we
also compared the percentage of the county list seen. The top 10
using that measure:

Okanogan: 89.0%
Pend Oreille: 80.9%
Adams: 79.6%
Yakima: 79.5%
Walla Walla: 78.8%
Douglas: 78.5%
Clark: 78.3%
Spokane: 77.9%
Island: 77.6%
Kitsap: 77.4%

Finally,
48 species were recorded in all 39 counties.
144 in 30 or more counties
213 in 20 or more counties
31 species seen only in one county

A copy of the complete list will be available soon at the Washington
Birder website: wabirder.com . If you'd like to take a look right
away, just drop me an email and I'll send you the file via email.

Thanks most of all to all the compilers for keeping track of the
counties, and I look forward to seeing how 2008 shapes up!

Matt Bartels
Seattle, WA