This year was the first I signed up for the full Iowa eBird Rare Bird Alert as I was curious what was around the state. But, even though I've now lived in Iowa City for about a decade, I quickly realized I don't know where any counties are besides Johnson and Linn. So I decided to make myself a little web app to show me where these rare bird alerts were taking place.
The app isn't super refined, but good enough for now. If you have issues, just click the reset button top right. It only shows the last 7 days of rare bird alerts. I didn't put any time into making sure it looked great on your phone. Nor did I try to integrate taxonomic order as I only wanted to spend a night on this while the weather was bad and I couldn't go out birding.
Some features:
- Click on a county to see only the RBAs for that county - Click on a bird to see what counties it is being reported from - Use the search to find a bird you're looking for. Click on the bird as it comes up. - You can sort the columns forward and backward by clicking on the column headers, but I was too lazy to put little arrow icons there - It does try to filter out duplicates from the same email, but if a bird was reported multiple different times at the same place, it will appear on the list multiple times
Eventually I plan on volunteering some time to the IOU website. I still have to work on that bird blind and platform thing I posted about last week. Maybe this can wind up living there at some point as well.
