The information given here is intended to supplement the information that is on the official web sites for the 2nd Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas (BBA) project http://bird.atlasing.org/Atlas/PA/ and http://www.carnegiemnh.org/atlas/.
If anything here contradicts what is on the web site, the web site should take precedence unless noted otherwise.
Some of this material may be relevant only to RCs and block owners who are members of the State College Bird Club.
You may participate in the Atlas project by first registering as an Atlas participant on the BBA web site. After registering, you can become a block owner in a region by requesting specific blocks in the region. Detailed instructions for how to do this are on the BBA web site. After you have registered, you can print topographic maps of any of the 4900+ blocks in Pennsylvania.
Introduction to the 2nd PA Breeding Bird Atlas Project (State College Bird Club)
The web page Breeding Bird Atlas projects has links to Atlas projects in other states and some include their own Field Handbooks.
For a general discussion of Habitats, see our local Habitat Guide to Centre County Area Birding
For a guide to finding some of the more difficult species, see Hints on Haunts but note that this was written with New York Atlasers in mind and there are codes which we do not use, and perhaps some of the habitats are different than for PA. This is also available in the original PDF form from Hints on Haunts[PDF].
The BBA web site has two field cards that can be used to record your observations: the Field Card and the Summary Card. You can print these on your home computer by printing one side first, removing the paper, turning it over, and then printing on the other side. The Summary Card has a list of all expected species with the safe dates for each species.
Color-coded spreadsheets for RCs are available to graphically help keep track of block assignments. The initial version of these were created by Glenn Czulada, Regional Coordinator for Region 53.
Spreadsheet for EVEN pages
Spreadsheet for ODD pages
The list of breeding codes, special species, and safe dates may be found in the Atlas Materials on the BBA web site. The web page Atlas Materials also contains: Newsletters, the Interim Atlas Handbook, report forms, and other atlasing items that can be downloaded to your computer and printed.
Updated 4/17/2007, rbf