The New York Breeding Bird Atlas is a long, quiet experiment: every twenty years, the same state, the same grid, a new generation of volunteers. The questions are simple. What is nesting here now? What was here last time? What moved?
The first atlas, conducted from 1980 to 1985, was the brainchild of Robert Andrle and Janet Carroll, working out of the Department of Environmental Conservation and the New York State Museum. It produced a 551-page volume from Cornell University Press in 1988 and, more importantly, a baseline.
The second atlas, 2000 to 2005, was led by Kevin McGowan and Kimberly Corwin. It was the first to benefit from the early era of online data entry, and it more than doubled the first atlas's record count. Published in 2008, it gave New York its first quantitative picture of twenty-year change.
The third atlas, 2020 to 2024, ran entirely on eBird. Four thousand volunteers carried a pocket-sized field book in their pockets and submitted more records than the first two atlases combined. This website is its home.
An atlas is a collaboration between a state and its watchers. Every landowner who let a stranger walk their back field, every retiree who ran a block for five springs, every teenager who drove three hours to sleep in a tent and listen for nighthawks — they are all co-authors.