NORTH CHESTERFIELD, VA., April 15, 2015 – The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has announced the eBirder of the month for March, 2015.

Please join us in congratulating Greg Wagner of High River, Alberta, winner of the
March 2015 eBird Challenge, sponsored by Carl Zeiss Sports Optic. Our March winner
was drawn from among those who submitted at least 20 complete checklists containing one or more species of waterfowl in the month of March. Greg's name was drawn randomly from the 2,096 eBirders who achieved the waterfowl challenge threshold. Greg will receive our award winning ZEISS Conquest HD 8×42 binoculars for his eBirding efforts. We asked Greg to tell us a little more about himself, his use of eBird, and his love of birds – read on for more!

I first really became aware of eBird in October 2011 when I was approached to be the volunteer Important Bird Area (IBA) Caretaker for Frank Lake, south of Calgary, Alberta. The lake is 5 minutes from my home and is a site that I have regularly visited for decades. Because eBird is the reporting vehicle for the IBA program, I began using it to record bird observations for my trips to Frank Lake and elsewhere. I am now pleased to report that as of the Easter long weekend, there are an average of more than 40 complete checklist per week for the site. There have also been more than a thousand historical checklists submitted to eBird for the lake, with several hundred more still to be entered. There is now a substantial database on bird occurrence at the lake, which can be used to inform management, land use and development activities – thanks to eBird! My only regret is that I didn't discover eBird sooner so that more of my birding information could have been recorded."

ZEISS currently acts as the lead page sponsor of eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/. A real- time, online checklist program, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community ZEISS currently acts as the lead page sponsor of eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/. A real- time, online checklist program, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community reports and accesses information about birds. Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird provides rich data sources for basic information on bird abundance and distribution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales and allows for precision science to help conservation efforts. Part of this effort will be to recognize the ZEISS ebirder of the Month for their contributions to eBird with a pair of Conquest HD binoculars.

For more information, please see the website at:

http://www.ebird.org About the ZEISS Group

ZEISS is an international leader in the fields of optics and optoelectronics. The more than 24,000 employees of ZEISS generated revenue of about 4.2 billion euros in fiscal year 2012/13. Founded in 1846 in Jena, the company is headquartered in Oberkochen, Germany. ZEISS has been contributing to technological progress for more than 160 years. ZEISS develops and produces solutions for the semiconductor, automotive and mechanical engineering industries, biomedical research and medical technology, as well as eyeglass lenses, camera and cine lenses, binoculars and planetariums. ZEISS is present in over 40 countries around the globe with more than 40 production facilities, around 50 sales and service locations and over 20 research and development sites. Carl Zeiss AG is fully owned by the Carl Zeiss Stiftung (Carl Zeiss Foundation).