My 20th eBird Anniversary

 October 18 marks my 20th anniversary as an eBird user!  Can't believe it has been 20 years!  

As an old man, I now look back and see that on 18 Oct 1982, 20 years before I started using eBird, I was a young teenage birder with only 152 birds on my life list. 20 years before that I wasn't even alive and the Beatles had just released their first single, "Love Me Do."

20 years ago, eBird was brand new and still pretty clunky and rudimentary. I only used it a few times before I lost my password. I didn't start using it on a regular basis until creating a new profile in July 2005 when I was working with Audubon and starting to collaborate with Cornell Lab of Ornithology on the Great Backyard Bird Count and eBird promotion.

Here's what eBird looked like back in October 2002.

This was back in the days before the Google Maps functionality, when eBird had its own proprietary mapping function (which got Cornell and Audubon some cool patents that Google and others have since used). 

So 20 years of eBirding for me.  My first bird entered into eBird? A rare Northern Goshawk at Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Facility, my old stomping grounds. I never entered any notes on that rare sightings--I should probably go back and do that sometime :-)