About NABA Sightings

Sighting submission

Please submit interesting and timely sightings such as…

  • the first Monarch to cross the Rio Grande in mid February
  • the Painted Ladies streaming north ward in the southern California desert,
  • the Spring Azures emerging in February in New Jersey, etc.

We welcome all sightings, but very unusual sightings will be labeled as “possible” unless accompanied by a recognizable photograph, or convincing description of the butterfly and the circumstances of its sighting.

When submitting sighting photographs, we encourage you to submit images of around 2 megapixels (1600 × 1200px). At present, they will be shrunk to fit 800×600, but in the future they may be displayed at larger sizes.

Photographs received may be resized and posted to the Recent Sightings pages. Photographs remain the property of photographer. The scientific names associated with the English names given above are listed separately.

Creating your account

All submitters on the new system need to sign up for a free account. The accounts help us keep better records, and will make submitting easier, since it remembers your name, email, and the last state you selected.

You can create an account the same way as you do most online services, by entering your name and email and setting a password.

You can also create an account without having to remember a login or password, by linking your existing Google or Facebook account. Just click the button on the sign-in page, accept the prompt from Google or Facebook, and your NABA Sightings account will be created. The next time, just use the same button to log in.

Be careful that you don’t switch services — if you create an account with Facebook, and then the next time you log in to NABA Sightings, you click the Google button, then you will have created two different accounts. Your previous sightings won’t be collected under your new account.

What’s new?

This automated sighting system is a replacement for the old NABA recent sightings page. The new system has two big advantages:

  1. Sightings go into a database. This will allow us to filter and export the data in the future.
  2. Archiving is automatic. The old site required a lot of manual labor on the part of the sighting moderator.

This is just the first iteration; we will continue to refine sighting submission and display as we get more data. We’d like to make the system as easy to use as possible, so let us know if you have questions or concerns.

Technical Notes

The site was developed by David Reese, modeled after the Wisconsin Butterflies sighting system, which has been in use since 2005. It is moderated by Mike Reese.

US County maps are produced with d3.js, by Mike Bostock. Albers projection derived from work by Tom Carden.

The header font (p.s.type’s Ratio Display) and the body font (Mark Simonson’s Proxima Nova) are served from Typekit.

The image zoom effect courtesy Photoswipe by Dmitry Semenov.

Contact us

Feedback? Contact Jim Springer, springer@naba.org.