Hi Tweeters & INWBers -

I've been meaning to send out a summary of the 2008 county list
project, but kept putting it off. Now, with January gone, it's time.
I'll follow this message soon with another that includes info about
the 2009 version of the same project.

In 2008, for the 3rd year now, 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 is 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 2008. Every
county has a compiler who is tasked with keeping track of reports
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 takes more
work to learn of sightings of even the more regular birds. Every two
months, I ask all the compilers to send me their updated lists and I
pull them all together into a state list and pass them along to
Washington Birder for posting on their website.

To see the completed 2008 list, go to: http://www.wabirder.com/bartel.html

If you are interested in some tidbits of how 2008 looked, read on:

Overall, for 2008 we recorded 396 species for the state. That's a
little lower than last year, when we came up with 400 species. 377
species were seen in the state in both 2007 and 2008. The totals for
Western WA and Eastern WA were also a little lower this year : 359
species in Western WA, 332 in Eastern WA (vs 367 & 333 respectively
in 2007).

I took a look at the records for Eurasian Collared-Dove (EUCD), the
species with the most rapidly advancing range across WA recently. In
2008, 29 of Washington's 39 counties reported (EUCD), vs 25 in 2007
-- in the past 2 years, 32 of Washington's counties have had EUCD.
Given that just 5 years back, in 2003, EUCD were still unusual enough
to merit a cross-state chase for some of us, that's a pretty
amazingly fast spread.


In 2008, 29 counties recorded more than 200 species. The counties
with the highest totals recorded were:

Okanogan 274
King 269
Yakima 265
Grays Harbor 258
Skagit 258
Clallam 257
Walla Walla 254
Grant 251
Snohomish 247
Whatcom 244


Since some counties have a bigger 'base' list of possible species
than others , we also compared the percentage of the county list seen
in each county. The 12 counties that tallied more than 75% of their
county list include:

Okanogan 91.03%
Yakima 83.60%
Adams 83.45%
Klickitat 79.33%
Spokane 78.74%
Grant 78.44%
Douglas 78.19%
Pend Oreille 77.74%
Walla Walla 76.97%
Cowlitz 76.33%
Lincoln 76.01%
Kitsap 75.16%

Final tidbit: 56 species were reported in every county in 2008, 27
were reported in just one county.

We can use your help in 2009 as we continue this project -- take a
look online or in the next message for details on where to send your
reports.


Good birding,

Matt Bartels, Seattle, WA