Welcome to Santa Barbara County Birding. Please feel free to post messages
to the group whenever you have bird related items to share such as an
unusual sighting, to comment on something posted, or to pose a question to
the group you would like an answer to. This forum is intended for the
beginner as well as the serious birder with more extensive experience
birding in the county. You can also use it to announce upcoming meetings,
field trips, pelagic trips, and other birding events and festivals in need
of publicizing.

To familiarize yourself with local bird life, habitat, and seasonal
occurrence, an excellent source of reference is Paul Lehman's book, "The
Birds of Santa Barbara County, California" on the status and distribution of
the birds of this county. This will give you a sense of what is considered
"unusual" and worth mentioning to this group. A must have.

You can view the California Bird Records Committee web site for a complete
list of all birds recorded in California. Go to the Western Field
Ornithologists web site at http://www.wfo-cbrc.org/ and click on the CBRC
link. For truly rare bird sightings, you should be aware of "review
species," those that require documentation for acceptance of the record.
There you will also find an electronic rare bird report form for submitting
rarity sightings to the CBRC for review. You can also report rare bird
sightings to the Santa Barbara Audubon Society's Rare Bird Alert at
(805)964-8240. Documentation can be in written form. Please be prepared to
provide a copy for Santa Barbara County record keeping.

Do's and don'ts:
Please don't use it to advertise or sell personal goods. Since this is a
"free" listserve there is an advertising banner on the page. Don't make it
worse by peddling something. For an additional monthly cost the ad banner
can be removed, but that won't be coming out of my pocket.

This is set up so only subscribers can post to the group. For reasons of
privacy, the members list cannot be viewed by just anybody. When you use the
"Reply To" feature on your mailer, you will send a message to the entire
group. Often, a response to a posted message can be interesting to the
entire group. If you wish to send a private response to the originator of
the message, send it directly to their personal email address.

Do limit the subject of your post to that of birds in Santa Barbara County
and birding in general. Don't send messages on internet hoaxes, virus
warnings and the like.

As most birders are, be courteous, friendly, and be willing to share
information.

Thanks for your participation and interest. I hope you will find this
informative and fun! Good birding.


Jamie Chavez
Santa Maria, CA