Dear Tweeters,

I am not a regular E-Bird user, having put my efforts into AviSys instead. I also have slow Internet at home, and do not use any high-tech gizmos in the field, having barely the savvy to make a call on the cell phone that my wife has pressed upon me.

However, I have been working on improving my use of the "Places" table in AviSys, and I have some thoughts on the problems raised recently on Tweeters, as regards places or "hotspots."

I use the second-to-most-recent version of AviSys, and am not sure if the newest version has a different "Places" arrangement. In the previous versions, such as mine, there are the following hierarchical levels (arranged from smallest to largest): site; city; county; state; nation; continent.

I have always wished that there were at least one more, and preferably two or three more levels. It might even be nice if AviSys allowed one to create as many levels as desired.

If we are limited to just the levels mentioned above, then there are times when it makes sense to call something a "city," even when it isn't. Within Washington State, though, since most birders pay at least some attention to counties, we are sort of stuck with the existing 39 counties.

I bird a lot on the Butler Flats in Skagit County. I often visit the site known as Green Road Pond (now called "Green Road Slough" on recently installed signage). I call Butler Flats a "city" on AviSys.

It occasionally becomes an issue as to what the boundaries of Butler Flats really are. Across the freeway, one is in the Samish River drainage, so it makes sense to call the flat farmland west of I-5 and north of SR 20 "Samish Flats." That is a "city" in AviSys parlance. Within that "city" are such sites as the West Ninety, Edison, and West Edison. It is a bit inconvenient to call a little town like Edison a "site," since politically it is more of a "city." That's why I wish there were at least one more level in AviSys, higher than "site" but lower than "city." Even so, it's possible to work up a very nice sites arrangement in AviSys, with some forethought.

I have a little project that I keep putting off. Since I bird Skagit County so much, I would like to divide the whole county into "cities" so I can put them all in my AviSys "Places" table. My pet plan here would be to use existing voting precincts whenever possible. Most of the reasonably densely populated parts of Skagit County are divided into these precincts. Most people give them no thought at all, until they step into a voting booth--which is never, of course, since we now have voting by mail! Still, these little areas are just the right size for "granularity." They tend to be about the same area as that of a smallish town. Within these precincts are lots of birding sites. For example, the place where Eurasian Collared Doves first showed up to stay in this county is on the Skagit Flats, west of Mount Vernon. It's in a tidy little voting precinct called Harmony. Who knew! Since that area is not in a town, but rather in an unincorporated area of the
county, I end up just putting the bird sightings into "Skagit County." That's because I have not got around to divvying up the whole county into "cities."

When I get around to doing so, then I will be able to search AviSys very efficiently. Right now, a search can give some oddball results. If I see a White-crowned Sparrow hopping along the shoulder of SR 20 way up in the mountains, a few miles west of the Easy Pass trailhead, then that sighting's assigned to "Skagit County." If I see a White-crowned Sparrow hopping along the shoulder of SR 20 half a mile south of Pass Lake, just north of Deception Pass, it, too, is assigned to "Skagit County." Those are two wildly different locales, no?

Oh, here's the county map showing the precincts:

http://www.skagitcounty.net/GIS/ftpfiles/Documents/Voting/vp150.pdf

Forgive the rambling here....

Yours truly,





Gary Bletsch ? Near Lyman, Washington (Skagit County), USA ? garybletsch at yahoo.com ? ?

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