Photo © NestWatch

Bring it on!

Even though the weather is cooling down, the competition for the ultimate NestWatching state is just heating up. If you’ve had a chance to explore our new home page at NestWatch.org, you may have noticed a little map of 2012 nesting attempts by state that features the most common species monitored for NestWatch. By clicking on a bird image, you can access that species’ data entry map; the darker the state, the more attempts have been entered by volunteers in that state. Mouse over the states on these maps to find out how many attempts have been recorded so far for each species. Cool, right?

Now, here’s your chance to turn those data into great prizes. We invite you to participate in a friendly challenge to predict which states will reign supreme when it comes to entering data for some of America’s favorite nesting birds. Each week on our Facebook page, we’ll post a new bird species along with the current top 5 state leaderboard. Look at the data entry stats for that week’s species on our home page, then make your predictions for what the top 5 states will be at the end of the year using the voting link provided in the Facebook post. One point will be awarded for each correct rank. On December 14, final tallies of nesting attempts entered in 2012 per species will be calculated for each state, and the person with the most correct rankings will win a free Cavity-nesting Birds poster, Common Nesting Birds poster, and a Bluebirds Inside the Nest Box DVD. Visit us on Facebook for a new species challenge every week until Thanksgiving, and be sure to enter your nesting data soon because you just may be a game-changer. May the best fan win!