New Mammalwatching Pages : Bat recording and where to see some difficult US species

Many of you will have seen Brian Keelan’s recent report of a 2014 big mammal day. It turns out Brian has been interested in mammals for a long time but only stumbled upon the mammalwatching blog and site recently. He has some great information and I’m delighted to say he is happy to share it!

Brian has been kind enough to send me this page on bat recording and identification in California. If others have similar information for other areas please do let me know.

Brian has also started a list of where to see some of the USA’s harder mammals, with some specific (detailed) locations for a bunch of species that are quite tricky to see (he put this together for birders). What a pity that we didn’t know about this in time for Vladimir’s upcoming guide on where to see the mammals of north america. Brian’s page on “mammal finding in the ABA area” is here.

In the longer term he and I are thinking about trying to add information from others to make this a more complete reference for the rarer species. But more on this in due course….

Jon

4 Comments

  • tomeslice

    Excellent information on this page!

    As I was reading through it I thought of some info that should be added to some species.

    You know what we (the mammal community) should do?
    Start a shared excel spreadsheet that anyone can edit, which has a list of mammals by region (same as how the world is divided on your website). This would be so useful for so many reasons:

    1. You can “ctrl+F” any animal, and it will take you directly to this species and where/when is best to find it
    2. You can “ctrl+F” the name of a PLACE (national park/reserve/etc) and it will take you to all the species that have this place in their information
    3. It’s dynamic so people can add information or line-through information as no longer relevant (like mountain lions at Big Bend, IMO)
    4. It’s the BEST IDEA EVER because I thought of it.

    Ok, scratch 4.. I just didn’t have anything to add but didnt’ want to only have 3 points.

    I actually started an excel sheet like this, but it has an embarrassingly insufficient amount of information to publish.

    And Max Chiswick who has some programming experience was entertaining the idea of making a database like this for the mammal watching community based on people’s trip reports.

    • Jon Hall

      Tomer, this is the mammalwatching equivalent to Stephen Hawking’s theory of everything! I was discussing something similar with Brian (so you can delete your no. 4 🙂 ) … but not quite sure how to proceed as it is way beyond my level of knowhow. Is Max in the US?

      jon

  • vdinets

    It looks like I have almost all locations in the book, but the one for California k-rat is completely new to me and would be a nice addition.

  • John Fox

    Thanks to Brian for the great effort! It is really helpful.

    We surely need some kind of interactive method. For example, I saw a Ringtail at Rattlesnake Springs, it looked for all the world like he was just going on his regular route for the night, but nobody (but Matt in Idaho, because he asked me) knows about it.

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