Just back from a riverboat cruise on the Amazon River with Wildside Nature Tours. What a trip it was! A post and report will be forthcoming…soon I hope. In the meantime, I am behind on warbler migration. The last few years I have linked the Eastern Wood Warblers with their corresponding realtime updated maps in eBird. See link below.

You will note that I have 2 additional columns: Lower48 Rank and Lower48 Miller Scale. The Lower48 Rank is a sequential ranking of the total number of positive checklists submitted to eBird for a specific species in the Lower 48 contiguous States of the U.S. The lower the rank, the more commonly reported that species is in eBird. The most commonly reported species in eBird in the Lower 48 States is Mourning Dove. So it gets a rank of 1. Yellow-rumped Warbler is the most commonly reported warbler in eBird. It has a Lower 48 Rank of 27. It is the 27th most commonly reported species in eBird in the Lower 48 States. Kirkland’s Warbler is the warbler with the least total checklists in my list with a Lower 48 Rank of 623.

The Miller Scale is a little different measure. Even though the sorting will be the same as with the sequential ranking, this number is patterned after the old statistic used to measure the power of an earthquake. It was called Richter Scale. So if you compare an earthquake with a magnitude of 1.0 versus an earthquake with a magnitude of 2.0, the second earthquake (2.0) would be 10x as strong as the first earthquake (1.0). So I set the Mourning Dove as a 1.0. I measure every other species as compared to Mourning Dove so that I have a little different way to measure how often a species is reported in eBird. So Northern Parula has a Miller Scale of 2.1 and a Cerulean Warbler has a Miller Scale of 3.1. They have a difference of 1.0. This means that there are 10x more checklists in eBird for Northern Parula than for Cerulean Warbler. I hope you get the idea.

Please note that this is not the same as abundance. A checklist with 1,000 Red-winged Blackbirds is the same as a checklist with 1 Red-winged Blackbird. They both represent 1 checklist. I use this measure simply because it is readily available in eBird and can easily be used on a large scale (as in millions of checklists for the U.S.). The data used for these numbers was retrieved in June of 2015. It uses all months for all years from 1900 through 2014.

So without further adieu, here is the link to Where Are The Warblers Now, 2016 Edition.