If you're like me, you regularly hop on the 401 to travel from one part of southern Ontario to another. And while you're doing that you are probably looking for birds!
The 401 has kilometre markers every 2km for most of it's length and every 100m (or is it 200m?) through the GTA, plus the exits are numbered to the nearest kilometre marker so it is easy to keep track of where you are whenever you see an interesting bird. I've been using the kilometre marker system to keep track of my bird records in eBird for a couple of years now and have divided it up into 10km segments, which is long enough so keeping track is reasonable but not too short as to make the information being entered unreasonably vague.
I thought I'd share the location markers for each stetch so if anyone else wants to also record their eBird data in this way they can. Over time with several people recording we could get some interesting patterns on birds like Red-tailed Hawks that are easy to survey for while driving 100+ km/h
Anyways below you'll find a list of all of the 10km stretches with a link (note the first 10 km doesn't yet exist). Just log into eBird then click through each link. That will share a checklist from the location with you and then you'll have the location as an option when you enter a checklist next time. Once you have accepted a checklist you can delete it and the location will still appear in your account.
I'll leave a permanent link to this article at the top of the blog so if you want to come back and get the locations later it will be easy to find. As usual, please email me (mike.burrell.on@gmail.com) if you notice an error.
Once you add the locations you can use them to define an eBird patch to see how you rank compared to other people and before you even do that you can explore a barchart for all of the segments together.
I'll add links for the other 400 series highways soon
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