A Simple Way to Make Gmail Work For Birders

I am a frenetic reader of too many RSS feeds, an obsessive user of read-later and schedule-your-tweet apps, an incessant downloader of pdfs and pictures. In short, I am about as information overload as they come. Just for what could be boiled down to mental stimulation, I attempt to tackle information from more internet sources than any sane human should.

My ever-growing research archive. Notice the scroll bar on
 the far right...I have A LOT to read

Why? In an attempt to internalize as much ornithology as possible, I follow research from a growing international community of people and institutions. Some of the fruits of this process make their way here, and most make their way to Twitter. It's quite a task, as there is a surprisingly huge volume of bird-related research published weekly. But you know how it is...oh the things we do for curiosity.

Let's take a step back...how do I have time for this? When I wake up every morning, after the European ornithological institutions have already been tweeting ornithology for hours, I have tens of abstracts and blogs to sift through. Trouble is, I have neither the time nor the focus for it at that time of day. For that reason, I robotically save unread research into the app Pocket, doing so with the assumption that I will read and share (tweet or blog) later. Right now, I have around 160 pieces of research waiting. They are ready for when the thirst of curiosity stimulates my attention. It is an act of constant collection, letting the research come to me and making it available when I'm ready to digest. But there's a lot. Will I ever get caught up? Forget that pointless question. The point is that it is possible to take what would normally be information overload, and make it manageable.

Sightings are constant.

This process, perhaps one peculiar to me, mirrors something all birders do. Similar to my indiscriminate consumption of research, most birders sift habitually through an endless stream of bird sightings. And like with the research, the sightings are reported from a constantly growing variety of sources. Unexpected as it may seem, birders have utilized the internet in full by constantly sharing their findings with others. In doing so, birders are building a vast network of individuals collectively monitoring the world's avifauna, and anyone has access to it. As I write this, via Facebook, a Snowy Owl was just found on the Milwaukee lakefront. Via eBird, there's a Fork-tailed Flycatcher in Texas. Via various birding listservs, there's a Western Grebe along the Chicago lakefront, a Cassin's Kingbird in New York City, and a Lark Sparrow in Massachusetts (I originally wrote this post in a slightly more birdy time of year). This doesn't count posts made on Twitter, regional birding forums, or personal blogs. Almost by the minute, new posts are made about birds everywhere.

The value in following sightings is obvious: knowing what's around helps you understand bird phenology, which in turn helps you predict when the birding will be best. And then, of course, there's the value it provides for birders looking to chase rare birds. In the end, regardless of why you follow sightings, the challenge is juggling the many sources of sightings to stay up to date.

But as with everything internet, it really is too much. Just as there's too much research published weekly to stay completely apprised, there are too many people reporting too many sightings from too many places. How do we keep track of the important bits that maximize our birding and feed our curiosity, while cutting out the noise from all the other sources?

A difficult question, but it's one I may have an answer to.

Like what I did with my research process above, we need to make the grand volume of sightings work for us rather than the other way around. We need sightings sent to us, earmarked so that they don't clutter the other information streams we manage in our lives (it's 2015...there are plenty).

Before we get into the process itself, there's one simple decision to make: what is relevant? Many of us follow the local birding listservs, get eBird alerts, and look at Facebook groups. Living in Illinois and being who I am, I look at sightings from IBET, eBird Needs Alerts and RBA's, Facebook's ABA Rare Bird Alert Group, and Illinois Birders' Forum. Your chosen sources may be different than mine; what's important is that you identify what is relevant to you.

Having identified the sources above as relevant to me, I could just bookmark them and hop from one to the next. But with that many sources, this "hopping" requires a lot of time, and ultimately I leave the endeavor with little stuck in my mind. So instead, using Gmail, I adopted the following process. For the sake of convenience, I'll divide it up into a series of how-to "steps" with pictures: *Note that these are based on the sources I chose as relevant. Your sources and ability to subscribe may be different.

1. Subscribe to your relevant sources - I subscribed to everything from IBET, all my eBird alerts (I get 7 different kinds), the Facebook bird groups I follow, SurfBirds, and Illinois Birders' Forum. This is the most complicated step, but on each of these sites you can subscribe such that emails from that source go to a specified Gmail address. It must be the same Gmail address.
2. In Gmail settings, create a label/folder in Gmail called "Sightings".
   
3. When the first sightings stream into your inbox, copy the email address from which they came. Then, in Gmail settings, go to filters, and then to create new filter. In the menu that comes up, paste the address from which, say, eBird alerts come from into the "From" space. For listervs, you'll do the same thing, except you'll put the email address in the "To" space. For Facebook Alerts, rather than either of those, you'll put the name of the group in the "Includes" space. You'll learn these minutiae as you go, but I guarantee it's worth it. After you hit "create filter with this search", another menu comes up where you will select "Skip Inbox" and place in Sightings. Below, all this information is illustrated step-by-step with pictures. Before you look at those, here are all the sources I have filtered into my Sightings folder as examples:
• gregneise@ilbirds.com - placed in "From" category, these are notifications from Illinois Birders' Forum
• ebird-alert@cornell.edu - placed in "From" category, these are all eBird alerts.
• webmaster@surfbirds.com - placed in "From" category, these are SurfBirds Daily Digests.
• [ABA Rare Bird Alert] - placed in "Includes" category, these are email notifications from the ABA Rare Bird Alert group on Facebook.
• [Illinois Birding Network] - placed in "Includes" category, these are email notifications from the dominant Illinois birding group on Facebook.
• ILbirds@yahoogroups.com - placed in "To" category, these are sightings from the Illinois Birding listservs

Under settings, go to Filters, and then git "Create a new filter"

This menu will appear out of the Gmail search bar. Plug in email addresses for your various Sightings Sources, and then
hit "Create filter with this search", which is pale gray and hard to see at the bottom right of the menu.

After that, your options on how to filter in the addresses you just plugged in will appear.

Finally, do this stuff!

You will see that all relevant sightings are, without any effort on your part, sent directly to a folder you designate specifically for sightings. You can go there, one central location, at any time to check up on only the sightings that a relevant to you. But this is the best part: at any time, you can search this folder for any birds you want to find. Rather than searching Facebook, eBird, and listervs separately, there's only one place to search, where all sighting sources are combined.

Note that for users of Inbox by Gmail, the process has actually been streamlined, as you can filter emails into labels (now called Bundles) by simply clicking the email, putting it into your Sightings folder, and then clicking "Always do this". 

In Yahoo, the process is similar, if not a little bit more organized. You still need to find the relevant email addresses for your Sightings Sources, and then you plug them in under the Settings Pages called Filters:

In settings, which can be found by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner of the page, go to the filters menus.
You will have to create a new Sightings folder, and then hit add in the menu above to make a new filter.

Plug in the relevant email addresses in the appropriate places, and then next to "Then move the message to this folder", go
to the Sightings folder you've created.

Once you've gone through this one-time process, you'll find yourself in the know with minimal effort from here on out.

Pretty nifty, eh?