About

(If the text is red, it means it's a link to an article that does not yet exist. Create an account, login, and start typing.)

MageeMarsh.com is a wiki and blog and discussion area for birdwatching along the northwest Ohio lakeshore or southwestern Lake Erie, depending upon how you like to refer to the area from the mouth of the Maumee River to the Toussaint River.

The "manual" for this site and for birding in this area would have to be the Lou Campbell book The Marshes of Southwestern Lake Erie. I'll have to verify, but I believe this book is for sale at the Magee Marsh Nature Center and/or at the Black Swamp Bird Observatory's new offices and store at the entrance of Magee Marsh.

What it's not

This is NOT a site for only rare bird sightings. You can post the spectacular and the mundane here. If you were out birding for two hours and saw zippo, that's an observation. Post it here. Don't just post info about the amazing days.

This is not an official site of Magee Marsh or any other place along southwestern Lake Erie. This site is not affiliated with any organization. It is not a scientific research site, which means you can use any protocol you want to observe and record your bird sightings.

Last spring, I noticed the domain name was available, which really surprised me, so I bought it. The .org and .net domains were available too, but I don't care about those. Most people think of .com, anyway. If you want to start a website, always buy the .com version of your name if you can.

But this is not a commercial site. The meanings of .com, .org, and .net disappeared many years ago. This is simply a space I'm providing to accumulate as much information as possible about birdwatching along southwestern Lake Erie.

Purpose

I love birdwatching and I love watching birds along southwestern Lake Erie. This website's purpose is to make the birdwatching experience easier and more enjoyable for visitors and the people who live in northwest Ohio. And the more information you can absorb, the better. But it will take a while to get the information into the site, and it will requires others to post info too. I can't do it all, simply because I don't know everything.

I've met a lot of birders with a ton of info in their heads about migration and nesting habits specific to this region, and I need to get some of that info recorded here. Things like seeing a specific species of bird at a specific location at a specific time of day at a specific time of year under specific weather conditions. That's getting detailed, but that's how you get to see some birds others miss. Weather, timing, location, species, it all maximizes your chances to see good birds in less time. It's not all luck.

Account creation

This is a community site. Anyone can create an account and make a blog posting to the front page, create a new article, edit an existing article, and post comments.

When you create an account, it's not activated right away. A confirmation e-mail message is sent to the e-mail address you give during sign-up. In the confirmation message is a link to activate your account. If you don't receive the confirmation message, send an email to admin@mageemarsh.com and your account will be activated by the site administrator.

Inappropriate behavior

Nothing is physically deleted. Even if an article is wiped out, an older, good version can simply be made the main version again by editing the older version and clicking the "update" button.

Since a username is needed to create and edit articles, it's easy to see who intentionally blanked or defaced an article or published libelous information. It's easy to remove a bad article from being displayed, and it's easy re-instate a good version, but it's still a waste of administration time. The offending user account will be deactivated.

File uploads

File uploading does not exist at MageeMarsh.com. Web hosting for MageeMarsh.com costs $10/month, and at that price, not enough disk space exists for a lot of file uploading, which would primarly consist of bird photos.

I recommend using one of the free photo sharing services, like flickr or photobucket. Create an account at one of those sites, upload images, and then link to them from MageeMarsh.com.

Blog area

The front page of MageeMarsh.com contains the blog postings, which is basically like a message board. Post questions, how-to articles, helpful hints and tips, bird sightings, complaints, upcoming events, news, recommendations, whatever you want so long as it's somewhat related to birdwatching along the southwestern Lake Erie shoreline, which also includes a few miles inland, such as flooded farm fields.

Website problems.

For website bugs and features, however, it would be nice if users added a comment to the website issues article. But if a new blog posting is used instead, no big deal. The feature or bug will be added to the website issue article, anyway.

Commenting

Each article allows commenting.

Commenting on an article is an option for those who may feel intimidated with editing an article and having to deal with HTML or Textile markup. If some aspect of an article needs added, changed, or removed, a user can choose to make his or her suggestion with a comment. Someone else can edit the article according to the info in the comment.

General discussion about an article can also be done with commenting, as long as the comment is about the article. The comment area should be used as a tool to improve the article.

Contact

Contact admin@toledotalk.com for questions or problems.