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Making a List - Costa Rica Planning Part 2

posted by Tim Avery at
on Saturday, January 22, 2011 


So for the better part of the last week I have lived in Microsoft Excel during the wee hours of the night. Bouncing between eBird, Garrigues's The Birds of Costa Rica, and Excel I made my initial list, of species. I then went through and based of the field guide assigned each species an abundance:

A-abundant
VC-very common
C-common
FC-fairly common
U-uncommon
FUC-fairly uncommon
VUC-very uncommon
R-rare
VR-very rare
EXR-extremely rare

After that most of my time was in eBird and seeing which birds we could find at the places we were planning on visiting. I'm not nearly done as I am trying to come up with 2-3 locations for each species, but I have a rough start. As I have started going through, I added about 16 species, but removed 13 others so it is all breaking even.

When all is said an done, I will post a copy on the blog to go along with this series of posts.

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2 Comments:
Blogger Ryan O'Donnell said...

I know this spreadsheet image was for illustration only, but I noticed the highlighted blank. In my experience, Passerini's Tanager is very common in moderately disturbed habitats within its range (gardens, for example). It was among the most common tanagers I saw, surpassed only by Blue-gray Tanager and perhaps Palm Tanager. I saw only one Crimson-collared Tanager, in the trees over a shade-grown coffee plantation on the east slope.

January 23, 2011 at 12:49 PM  
Blogger Tim Avery said...

Ah yes! The yellow blanks were species added that I did not initially include in my list. I didn't realize that so many Caribbean slope species trickle into the valley between Poas Volcano and Barulio Carillo. I think I ended up adding about 10-15 species that were showing up on lists in this valley. They are of course just hopefuls, but stuff to be on the lookout for none-the-less.

Something funny I found in eBird are the hundreds of data points for Passerini's Tanager along the south Pacific coast. Obviously these are Cherrie's but they have not been filtered out in the database!

January 23, 2011 at 1:44 PM  

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