I failed to find this compiled map on that site. But as I said before, I kinda bumbled through the site looking at particular counties.
Right, you were ignorant of this.
Out of curiosity, how many years of checklists are represented on this map?
Most of them will be recent: "eBirding" has grown tremendously in popularity over the last decade. People can upload historical data though, and many have. I have most of my checklists from my analog field notebooks updated now, and those date back to the early 1980s. In Edmonson Co., I saw one checklist from the mid-1970s. This illustrates that people have been heavily birding the vicinity of your study area for decades.
So if you have checklists numbering 100 and 2 guys each submit 50 lists each, that's still only 2 guys in the woods.
Even if that were the case, you are only one guy in the woods and you claim to have encountered bigfoots on multiple occasions.
It's not the case however. Of course there are local people who submit multiple checklists each year, but it looks like several dozen at least are represented in checklists for Edmonson County.
Undoubtedly there will be a few folks that leave the main trails and highways to do some bird watching. My point was and is, most commonly they don't.
I don't dispute that, but some of them do. Some of them (not represented in the eBird data) specifically avoid doing surveys from the trails and roads to avoid potential road bias in their data. So? We've got people in your area, on trails and off trails. And?
What about bigfoot? Is he ever found near a trail or a road? According to leading bigfoot expert Jeff Meldrum, bigfoots sometimes wallow in mudbaths along roadsides, neatly dipping their testicles in the cooling clay whilst munching on Washington State's finest red delicious apples. Seems to me that one would be far more likely to chance upon a bigfoot while quietly making one's way down a wooded trail (
hey, that's what birders do!) than by trying to outstealth the wood ninja by sneaking up on him through the dry leaves and moving branches.
The overall point here Chris is that your personal observations of people in your study area is a tiny and highly biased perspective of the number of people who actually go there, the frequency with which the area is visited, and the actions of the people while there.
Birders are generally a high-skilled demographic specifically there to find unusual wildlife and in possession of optics that make them wonderfully suited to providing evidence of said wildlife.
