Welcome!

Welcome to the first post of the Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas 2 Blog. The name, “Distraction Displays” was the winning entry in an in-house blog-naming suggest-a-thon. Distraction Displays, DD for short, is a code atlasers use to describe a highly dramatic performance given by a breeding bird to lure a suspected predator away from a nest. Think Killdeer dragging a wing, running in circles, flopping and feigning injury, more urgent and distressed than any star from a silent film, and you can envision a distraction display.

Blogs are notorious for distracting their owners and readers, often pulling them away from more pressing work. We like the double entendre of the name, and while Atlas Blogged was a close second place finisher, in the end DD won out. Unlike the Killdeer we welcome the distraction, and we will try to keep the drama to a minimum.

The BBA2 is an information-rich project, and the folks in the field are passionate about this work. The collision of more than 1,000 survey blocks, 350+ field volunteers, and 200 nesting species combine to make 70,000,000 possible experiences – and sometimes it seems like we have a question for each ones. DD is a place to respond to these questions, and a place to share links to other bird conservation news stories in a casual and (hopefully) entertaining setting.

We need to warn you that we will be slow to post comments to the blog - nothing personal, but we are, as the Pentagon says, task saturated. We welcome your civil and appropriate Breeding-Bird-O-Centric photos and comments, questions, ruminations, links to other blogs, professional papers and news stories, reports, newsletters, etc. Originally blogs were annotated lists of interesting web sites, and we encourage you to send links to your favorite birding sites. To submit a comment to a post scroll past the post and there is a spot for entering comments. To submit an original post please send it with as little formatting as possible to birdatlas@massaudubon.org.

Go easy on us - the learning curve is steep, and we only have a few hours a week for this.

Here goes....