Regularly Occurring Birds in the District of Columbia

17 Jan, 2026

Let's say you're like me, and enjoy looking for birds of many different species in the District of Columbia. How many different species could you expect to find if you look regularly and diligently, in a variety of habitats, throughout the year?

Doesn't eBird already already provide an answer to this question with its checklist for the District of Columbia? This will show you that there are three hundred and thirty-three distinct species have ever been reported (and confirmed) on eBird. But this is a very expansive list. It includes, for example, the Band-rumped Storm-Petrel (Hydrobates castro) on the basis of one digitized record from 1893. If you go looking for this species in the District, you will be looking for a long time. The Band-rumped Storm-Petrel is not, under any reasonable definition, regularly occurring.

You could instead look at species lists from the days of organized birding events in past years, like big days in the spring or fall. You could fetch and merge a few of these lists and get a fairly representative list. But in some years it would omit species predominantly occur in the winter, like the Red-Breasted Merganser (Mergus serrator).

Conversely, there are species like the Roseate Spoonbill (Platalea ajaja) that have been easy to see in D.C. in some years. But they are hardly regularly occuring, in the sense that with enough effort you could be sure to see them in a given year.

Regular Bird Checklist

I define a regularly occurring species as one that has been observed in every recent year. For the purposes of this blog post, I have chosen the five year period beginning January 1, 2020.

This definition, translated into the SQL query below, produces a list of two hundred and seven species. "Total Observations" counts every checklist submitted and accepted by eBird that include the species in question throughout the five year period.

Implementation

First, I requested and received access to eBird Data Products. I downloaded ebd_US-DC-001_202001_202512_smp_relNov-2025.zip, and unzipped it. It contains a file named ebd_US-DC-001_202001_202512_smp_relNov-2025.txt, which is tab separated. I read this into a sqlite3 database table named observations with the following shell command:

sqlite3 ebird.db <<'EOF'
.mode tabs
.import ebd_US-DC-001_202001_202512_smp_relNov-2025.tsv observations
EOF

Then I ran this query in sqlite:

SELECT
    "SCIENTIFIC NAME",
    "COMMON NAME",
    COUNT(*) AS total_observations,
    COUNT(DISTINCT substr("OBSERVATION DATE", 1, 4)) AS years_seen
FROM observations
WHERE "Scientific Name" NOT LIKE '%sp.%' -- to exclude more general clades
  AND "Scientific Name" NOT LIKE '%/%' -- to exclude hybrids
  AND "Scientific Name" NOT LIKE 'hybrid'
  AND substr("OBSERVATION DATE", 1, 4) < "2025"
GROUP BY "SCIENTIFIC NAME", "COMMON NAME"
HAVING years_seen = 5
ORDER BY total_observations DESC;

Thank you to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for access to the eBird Basic Dataset (Version: EBD_relNov-2025. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Nov 2025).