Introducing Once Upon a Checklist
Every day birders from all around the world make checklists. They tally tanagers, count crows, iterate ibis and enumerate emus. Just this month, people will submit more than one million lists to eBird, the world’s most popular citizen science platform.
A million checklists a month! That’s a lot of counting, and a lot of numbers. It’s also lot of early morning walks on damp forest paths, a lot of tires pop-popping on gravel roads, a lot of sea spray and sunscreen, a lot of soggy socks and lost lens-caps. It’s a lot of conversations and arguments about IDs with a lot of friends, old and new.
It’s a lot of stories.
Right this minute, eBird’s data scientists are busy trimming all of this messy human stuff out of the data, to build population estimates and migratory models. Every day they’re learning more about species ranges, abundances, and environmental associations.It’s critical, necessary work. Let’s leave them to it.
With Once Upon a Checklist, I want to do just the opposite: to pick up the stories left behind. The sentences that didn’t fit into the comments fields, the bits of wonder and chaos (and love!) that have no place in a database. I’ll bring these stories to you, and the people behind them, in 40 minute podcast episodes that’ll feature interviews and research, strange birdy facts and surprising human tales.
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