Northwest Field Notes

Bird Reports from Oregon, Washington, and Adjacent Regions

Reprinted from Audubon Field Notes, American Birds and its successor journals. Permission for this reprint granted by the National Audubon Society. Production of these scanned and edited field notes by Phil Hicks.

Although the published field notes in Audubon Field Notes, American Birds and their successor journals have been available in pdf form (1972-early 2000s) for some years, it is difficult to conduct a fast, accurate search over that long period of time for specific records. For example, if you want to find all records of White-faced Ibis, you have to search scores of issues individually.  As a service to students of bird distribution in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon Field Ornithologists has produced exact replicas of these field notes in easily searchable Word documents.

We thank the National Audubon Society for graciously allowing these reprints to be made. Now available in fully searchable format are the following field notes:

For the period 1948-1995, the following states and provinces are now available as noted below:

Oregon complete
Washington complete
Idaho 1961-1989
British Columbia, southern 1961-1989
Alberta, extreme west 1961-1988
Montana, western 1961-1989
Nevada, northern 1961-1973
Colorado, western 1961-1973
Wyoming 1961-1973
Utah 1961-1973
California, extreme northeast 1961-1973

Because the files are large, they are placed here by year. When downloaded, they can be combined into blocks suitable to the needs of the user. The editors suggest five or ten-year blocks are reasonable search units.  We intend to add accompanying commentary, probably on a five-year block basis, that will highlight significant distributional changes or events in the Northwest. This will probably be done in 2012 after the scanning project is complete.

Although text has not been changed (for example, older field notes may say Green-backed Heron for a few years), a few minor editorial comments and corrections have been inserted, appropriately labeled with the author’s initials.  We are aware of a problem with conversion of some male and female symbols in these versions. When that problem is fixed, we will replace these copies with corrected copies. We felt that the value of the text would be apparent without those symbols in the short term, so are posting them as-is.  There may be occasional errors in the names of observers.  Please send and errors and corrections other than male-female symbols to Alan Contreras. They will be compiled for future correction.

We hope that this information is useful to you.

Phil Hicks, Grants Pass, Oregon
Alan Contreras, Medford, Oregon

November 2011