Colorado filter news

While this post will have little or no bearing on Wyoming birders, I write to inform the Colorado birding community that oversight of Kiowa County eBird entries is now managed by a county-specific filter rather than the broad (but getting less broad by the month) southeast Colorado filter.  This means that various species that are of regular occurrence in general in the southeast, but rare in Kiowa County will have more-meaningful filter limits.

Kiowa County eBird data include reports of 288 species, but many birders might be surprised by the number and variety of species for which there are no acceptable eBird reports from the county.  This list includes:

Lesser Prairie-Chicken

Black-chinned Hummingbird

Rufous Hummingbird

Red-bellied Woodpecker

Red-eyed Vireo

Pine Warbler

and

Black-throated Gray Warbler.

Other species are so rare in the Kiowa eBird data set as to make for the seemingly preposterous phenomenon that there are more records for Reddish Egret than (among many others) such species as Red-breasted Merganser, Northern Bobwhite, Virginia Rail, Wilson's Snipe, White-winged Dove, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Black-capped Chickadee, White-breasted Nuthatch, Brown Creeper, Eastern Bluebird, Sage Thrasher, Indigo Bunting, and Baltimore Oriole.

The next items on my to-do list are filters for Cheyenne (it is not particularly similar to anything else in the former southeast filter -- Baca, Bent, Crowley, Kiowa, Otero, and Prowers; note the water aspect of those counties), Archuleta and La Plata, and Lake.