Today we are excited to announce the new section to the Utah Birders website--BIRDING SPOTS!

Currently if you login to eBird to submit data, there are more than 1,300 hot spots listed for Utah.  The vast majority of those spots are unknown to most birders, and some rarely get birded.  The goal of our new SPOTS pages is to create an informational page to go along with every hot spot--YES, every single hot spot.  And that's no easy undertaking.  Currently there is nowhere on the web to find information about the majority of these locations.  The truth is we don't have the time, or knowledge of all the locations to be able to do this project alone--so we are asking for your help.  We want to build this database of locations to match eBird, and we want to do it as a community.  You know many of these hot spots better than anyone else out there, and we want this to be a community to help share this knowledge with others out there.  If everyone on UBIRD were to write up 4 locations, we would have the locations database done in a week.

But we know that not everyone has knowledge of every corner of the state, so what we are asking is if you want to--respond to utah.birders@gmail.com and volunteer to be part of the locations community.  We will give you access to blogger where we are building the database, and provide you with a template, and instructions on how to build out locations.  Then you are free to add any that haven't been created to the database.  What we really want is people to take care of the areas they know better than anyone else--the local spots that you bird often--the out of the way places you go, and anything that hasn't been added yet.  So if you bird Weber County or Sevier County a lot and know those places we want you to be the one making the pages for the hot spots in those counties.

We got things started and have almost 80 locations finished already.  It's a good start, but we want this thing to be comprehensive. If you don't want to actually add the locations into the system yourself, you can also use our submission form to submit locations information, and we'll add it to the database with a big thanks to you for your help.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1_O0LSGwUSFljUbABaESaLCuz5dvhr8LO__8vzoLCC6o/viewform

And that's it!  Let's see how many birding spots we can add to this community database.  It will be a great resource for birders, and compliment eBird nicely!