If you drive east from Los Angeles to visit Joshua Tree National Park or come west from Las Vegas you are crossing the Pacific Flyway. It is a major thoroughfare extending from Alaska to Patagonia and covers the deserts (covers California actually), one of the last great open spaces you can see it. See it? How can you see a flyway, it’s for birds? They travel way up in the sky and the smaller ones fly mostly at night. They have to touch down, sure, but not anyplace I know. Anyway I am not a birder (major form of recreation is looking for birds). Or maybe you are a birder, or just a lover of birds (takes and seeks opportunities to watch birds) but you still don’t know how you are supposed to see birds in such empty vastness, unless by accident.

There’s a way. The mechanism is the interactive website eBird; www.ebird.org. eBird is a citizen-science based bird observation project of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. On it you will find datasets from around the globe. Any competent bird watcher is encouraged to submit data. Each location is a ‘hotspot’ supported by one to over a thousand reported checklists. The visualization of the hotspots is displayed on Google maps. Species records including time of year and month by month abundance are in a spreadsheet format.

So, let’s say you are coming out to the 29 Palms Inn for the weekend. You are curious after reading this introduction so you go on line and find the website, click on Explore Data, click on Explore Hotspots, click on Hybrid for maps, type in 29 Palms Inn, click on the balloon and Voila! 96 species, 65 checklists. Click on View details and you will see what, when, and who. You will also notice other hotspot balloons adjacent to the Inn, click on each of those: Oasis of Mara - 58/44 and the Oasis Visitor Center - 89/83. Zoom out and see Lucky Park - 76/34 and Knott Sky Park – 81/50, all in 29 Palms. Getting to the Inn you drove (going east) by the internationally known hotspot Big Morongo Canyon Preserve in Morongo Valley - 228/1088. Stop there.

You don’t have to be a birder to enjoy eBird. Just knowing all those birds are out there busy about their business -- finding food, water, shelter, or for some species, a place to build a nest and raise babies -- makes your travels richer. You know the desert as alive, not empty.

Check it out. Explore. You could become addicted. You might take up bird watching.[1] You might suggest to bird loving friends that they post their lists. If they already do, take them to dinner in thanks for making the Pacific Flyway visible.