Technology felled the birding phone tree

In the beginning, decades before electronic media, reports of bird sightings in Minnesota were collected and distributed by telephone. Friends called two or three birding buddies, and they did the same, and so on.

It was a telephone tree. It worked because there weren't that many of us who cared that a pulse-raising bird had been seen.

The dial-up telephone was our social-media hardware. Our phones were mostly black Bakelite, sitting on a kitchen counter, tied to the wall with a cord. It was quaint.

That tree eventually was chopped down.

Friends were replaced with a telephone answering machine — the hot line. Reports of interesting sightings were recorded, then reviewed by an editor who made a master recording. Birders called the hot line for the latest news. Some still do.

Minnesota has two telephone hot lines: one for the state at large (763-780-8890), and another for northwestern Minnesota (1-800-433-1888). Both are operated by the Minnesota Ornithologists' Union (MOU).

When computer networks arrived, e-mail lists were created. Observers report sightings by e-mails shared with list members. Two are managed by theMOU: one for everyday sightings, a second exclusively for "rare" birds. A third list, MnBird, is managed in similar way. (For information go to moumn.org, and lists.mnbird.net/.)

Another reporting site, eBird (http://ebird.org.), is a valuable information source and research tool. You can have your own "page" on eBird, using it to keep an ongoing and updated list of your sightings in multiple locations.

The system was established and is managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The lab collects your data to create a master database showing bird locations and populations throughout North America. Its scientific value is enormous. EBird has state pages — there is one for Minnesota — that collect and display recent local data submitted by observers. Find it at http://ebird.org/ebird/places.

There is a Minnesota birding page on Facebook, plus numerous Facebook pages owned by individual birders who record their birding lives in words and photos.

Joining the bird reporting mix are the many birding blogs. So many.

Texting and Twitter have added two other ways to receive reports. These are CNN for birders, offering on-the-spot reporting. There even is a Minnesota app for smartphones (http://moumn.org/avian/smartphone.php).

If your interest extends beyond Minnesota, there is the national e-mail network BirdChat, plus other lists devoted to technical bird discussions. (Searchable archives of BirdChat can be found at http://listserv.ksu.edu/archives/birdchat.html.).

My birding information comes from the MOU e-mail service, the lists serving both Dakotas, BirdChat and occasional personal contact.

That's it, quite more than I thought possible in the days when I waited for my phone to ring and a friend to say, "We need to drive to Grand Marais."

I avoid Facebook. The only blog I read is my own. You can text me, but I'm not likely to see it. I do not use Twitter, even when tickled. Most of the time I answer my phone (no cord). I'm good with e-mail.

My friend Elizabeth, commenting on this large information nest, said, "You could spend days and days and days just looking at bird information online, never going outside. Maybe never even looking outside!"

Lifelong birder Jim Williams can be reached at woodduck38@gmail.com. Join his conversation about birds at www.startribune.com/wingnut.