Of Austria and Accentors with a hint of the Big Year

 

I digress by beginning my blog about a very informational piece of video from the Domain Name Registry of Austria known as NIC.at which explained the importance of protecting a domain name under their country code top level domain for Austria which is .AT (For Malaysia, our ccTLD is .MY). I love how they compare their .AT domain name to that of a car and how it is important for one's car (in Austria) to be protected by insurance against the weather and wild animals like the stag/deer in the video above.

I have ZERO knowledge of the bird species in the European region and more so for Austria so it was a delight to come across a blog that was written about some of the birds spotted such as Alpine Accentor, and Common Blackbird in Austria. These were included in an American birder's listings through eBird during her birding trip to Austria, as posted in her blog aptly named Bird Chick which you read about HERE. Her earlier trip in 2013 where she spotted the Alpine Chough can be read HERE. I'd be lucky if I could have dreams of Innsbruck, Austria which I had first visited with my family after graduating from the University of Manchester in 1996. It was a very hectic trip where we toured 6 European countries in 9 days. We slept in the coach (our driver was an Italian national - that much I remembered) for 4 nights traveling through several cities in Europe, staying 1 night only each in Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands. I do not recall seeing a single species of bird during that hectic tour.  Ebird is an amazing portal that belongs to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, USA. They count the EuroBirdPortal as one of their regional partners & collaborators. EuroBirdPortal has an impressive LIVE time mode of the Barn Swallow and Common Cuckoo species in their portal, where anyone can visualize the traces of these two species as well as three species of Swan (Mute, Black, Whooper) and five species of Goose (Bean, Pink-footed, Lesser White-fronted, Greater White-fronted and Greylag). The Euro Bird Portal listed one of their objectives was to adapt and improve the current EBP demo viewer and the spatial bird distribution models to reliably display detailed and up-to-date European-wide spatiotemporal patterns of bird distribution in near-real-time. You can learn more about them including the funding they received from the EU  HERE and about the European Bird Census Council which is described as an association of like-minded expert ornithologists cooperating in a range of ways to improve bird monitoring and atlas work and thereby inform and improve the management and conservation of birds populations in Europe HERE.  A screenshot of the portal's front page with the time mode and bird species display is shown below:- 

The Pink-footed Goose sticks in my mind as this species was mentioned by Jack Black's character in the movie about crazy birders "The Big Year" where he goes looking for it in Boston as part of his quest to become the best birder in America. Take a look at the Behind-the-Scenes snippet from the movie starring Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson below:-