Important message from Gigi Spates of Eastern Long Island Audubon Society:
The Eastern Long Island Audubon chapter, previously called Moriches Bay Audubon, has done a count in June for over 30 years called the Central Suffolk Breeding Bird Census. The circle, territories, and method follow that of the Central Suffolk Christmas Counts. A major difference is that the results have remained with the chapter, never sent on to National Audubon or the like.
Recently, the chapter decided that it would like to share these decades of breeding bird info with a larger database like Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird. The problem is that we have missing years of data. What we do have is the following:
1975 - 1984
1986
1993 - 1997
2006 - 2008
This means we are missing 1985, 1987-1992 and 1998-2005.
If you, or anyone you know, has ever worked this breeding bird count, please check to see if you have old copies of the compilation of the missing years. Then contact me at my email address, gspates@optonline.net, or call @ 631 765-1436. This data could be very useful in seeing documented birding trends on eastern Long Island over four decades.
LATEST UPDATE 7/21/2009
We have had some success in recovering some of the missing data. We managed to obtain a summary of the count covering 1975-1995 so we now have summary data for the 1985 and 1987-1992 counts. However we are still hoping to recover the detailed data from each of these counts. The counts were conducted by breaking the CBC circle into different sectors and the original reports included details for each of the sectors which makes the data more precise geographically. The summary mentioned above that was found contains totals for the entire circle only which is better than nothing but still not quite what we would prefer.