A visitor's guide to European birding portals (3 Viewers)

[rackelhahn]

Hi everyone,

I put together a guide to the various birding portals in Europe for travellers within the region or visitors from outside. In the past I've found it quite tricky to find info about bird sightings while travelling, so thought I would share (and expand on) what I've learned:

A visitor's guide to European birding portals

Despite the huge normalising influence of the EU, Europe is and will always be a patchwork of languages, cultures and institutions. The birding scene reflects this. Visitors from North America or...

www.bird-nerd.de

I would be very grateful for any feedback from those who know their local portals well. For some countries (e.g., the UK) it's tricky to work out what people are actually using and it's possible I have missed useful useful functionality. Criticism and tips are welcome!

 

[pbjosh]

I just had a quick look at it, that’s a really excellent effort you’ve made there to summarize it all.

You are quite right that finding local info around Europe is a quagmire and it can be a challenge to even quickly identify which is the main birding portal for a country, much less how to get useful data out of it!

 

[François Doyen]

I'd had that a lot of Northern France birders use an observation.org portal Ornitho Nord/Pas-de-Calais

 

[temmie]

Thanks for this wonderful overview as I often struggle as well when checking sightings in other countries.

For Georgia, rarities are often entered on Georgia.observation.org

This could have something to do with the start of systematic migration monitoring at Batumi which was initiated by 2 Belgians (and thus traditionally many counters came from Belgium / the Netherlands).

It could be worth checking (also for other countries, if the local site =
Insert-English-name-of-country.observation.org has entries, whether recent for rarities or older ones that are often in good habitat for endemics or other target species in said country.

Besides waarneming.nl / waarnemingen.be, the rarities are covered by dutchbirdalerts.nl
That site has a separate part for Belgian rarities. Recent info requires login and payment, but anything older than some hours is usually on the waarneming sites. So the added value is really for the speed / quality (no vague claims, everything is checked) / push messages you receive.

 

[3Italianbirders]

Fantastic job! Great stuff, really, and extremely useful. I can add my two cents re. Italy:

• Ornitho is popular especially among the older generation of birders and the professional ornithologists, but not very user-friendly
• Ubird is for members of EBN Italia, Italy's foremost birding organisation, so data is somewhat limited. BUT, EBN Italia is pursuing integration with eBird, and more of its members are now using it for inputting their data. More news about this are expected soon, so stay tuned.
• A lot of people I know use also the iNaturalist platform.

Thank you!

 

[jurek]

For Switzerland, Swiss Bird Alert has more rarities, and observations also support a local bird reserve: Swiss Bird Alert

Generally, ornitho and faune-france in every country are clones of each other. Using them is identical, only in France you select départements, in Germany Bundesländer, in Switzerland cantons, in Poland województwa etc.

One variable which seriously limits the usability of a particular platform is the number of secret observations and species. This seems to depend less on conservation needs and more from the general openness to strangers in a particular society. I don't see the rationale of e.g. automatically hiding all observations of a resident bird distributed in over 50% of atlas squares of a country and with a population estimate of hundreds of pairs.

Another valuable resource are non-birds like butterflies, dragonflies, mammals which are equally interesting to most birders. Here observation.org is the best, because it allows reporting of all groups of organisms. Ornitho clones differ between the country. France allows searching of many of groups including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects down to grasshoppers. Germany inexpicably lists only birds. For these countries / groups and Ebird the users must make use of Inaturalist portal.

 

[tomtompl]

Great initiative, much appreciated.
You should add Clanga for Poland. Guys are relentless in their queries of various sources for Polish rarities.

 

[opisska]

The sites depend really on whether you want to see common birds or get rarities. You're gonna miss a lot of rare birds in Germany if you don't subsrcibe do club300.de - I am not sure where they get the info from, but a lot of things are not on ornitho.de. As already mentioned, for rarities in Poland, clanga >> ornitho. But sadly a lot of rarity info in many places is just going around private channels ... we have had plenty of talk about this here.

Good that you mentioned AVIF for the Czech Republic - yes, it's evil to foreigners, no, they won't do anything about it. But recently, there has been a huuuuge shift to eBird - not that I'm particularly thrilled about it, but it's practical for foreigners. Some of the biggest birders in the country are big eBird fans and this means that most rarities appear there - if they by some accident aren't the finders, they're gonna twitch them anyway

 

[twitcherf]

The sites depend really on whether you want to see common birds or get rarities. You're gonna miss a lot of rare birds in Germany if you don't subsrcibe do club300.de - I am not sure where they get the info from, but a lot of things are not on ornitho.de. As already mentioned, for rarities in Poland, clanga >> ornitho. But sadly a lot of rarity info in many places is just going around private channels ... we have had plenty of talk about this here.

Good that you mentioned AVIF for the Czech Republic - yes, it's evil to foreigners, no, they won't do anything about it. But recently, there has been a huuuuge shift to eBird - not that I'm particularly thrilled about it, but it's practical for foreigners. Some of the biggest birders in the country are big eBird fans and this means that most rarities appear there - if they by some accident aren't the finders, they're gonna twitch them anyway

In the context of a foreign traveller, I'm not sure how important the rarities are.

When I am travelling to a foreign country, I am typically focussed on the special birds of that country. Great if I can see something rare, but typically something rare means something out of range, which is more easily seen in its normal range. I would be extremely unlikely to focus much time on a rarity.

Having said that it is always nice to connect with a rarity!

 

[opisska]

Exactly - most traveling birders thus do not really need up-to-date local info. If you wan to see local birds that are there all the time, then eBird is probably pretty much enough for most places in Europe. But since this work nicely summarizes a lot of obscure local pages with rarities, it's clearly also targeted to people interested in rarities.

You may then ask who are the crazy people who care for rarities when traveling and I can provide a prominent example: WP birders. This is why I have been already aware of most sites mentioned in the document

 

[jurek]

It much depends. Even so-called local breeding birds are often very tricky, and recent sightings of a breeding bird are a premium.