This group provides an unprecedented ability to gather data unavailable before or anywhere else. We all have a little bit knowledge about Connecticut birds that no one else has. By careful reporting and, gathering we can put the bits together to find patterns larger than the perceptions of any one person. One of my goals with the gulls was to demonstrate this idea and show what can be accomplished. We make judgments on the changing abundance and distribution of birds based upon our observations. How our observations are done may introduce a bias in our judgments. By examining our procedures and methodologies we can find our biases and control for them. This is standard procedure for scientists. What I am trying to do with the “Where do you go birding” is to identify the bias in our birding efforts. What areas get a lot of coverage and what areas get none. I think we all can list the top 10 areas off the top of our head, but this would be biased by our personal experience so no two lists would be identical. It would be good to have an objective measure without bias for a variety of reasons too long go into now. What we really don’t know is where people don’t go birding. In the “Where do you go birding” I tried to make it as simple as possible. Even so, there is a lot of individual variation. Two people may cover the same town the same number of times and one would call it a three and the other a two. This problem is taken care of by the magic of large numbers. The more people reporting the more variation gets averaged out and the more accurate the picture. I would like to get 100 people in this survey but would settle for 50. Less than that and the picture would be rather fuzzy and discerning only the obvious. And, frankly not worth reporting. It doesn’t matter if you are a homebody and only cover one town. How many like you are out there and where are you located? How many towns does the average birder cover? All that is important information. This data will be used only for this report (in case you have “Big Brother” issues). There are many active birders who’s names are often seen in the report I have yet to hear from. Just remember the 1 to 3 is a measure of frequency not a ranking. Here are some preliminary results. I hesitate to report them because it may introduce bias in future reports. I have 34 observers. There are 168 towns, 51 have no reports. The most frequently covered towns follow. Notice Fairfield is ranked higher than Bridgeport or Durham. Is that really the case or an artifact of not enough reporting? That is why I need more people. Also, It seems that reason we get fewer reports form the eastern shore is that the people there also spend time in western Rhode Island. Please, Please, Please, SEND ME YOUR INFORMATION, you know who you are. Dennis Varza Fairfield Madison 37 Stratford 28 Milford 26 New Haven 18 Litchfield 17 West Haven 17 Westport 16 Stonington 15 Fairfield 12 Old Saybrook 12 Bridgeport 11 Canaan 10 Durham 10 East Lime 10 Hamden 10