In our hyperconnected era, torrents of fresh sightings gush through the computers of eBird editors and splash onto our screens. The sheer volume of data can create an illusion that repeatedly touching our lips to the mighty eBird firehose will somehow quench our thirst for knowledge, but the resulting depth of understanding tends to be rather shallow. Deeper aquifers of wisdom are tapped when local experts curate collections of observations and place them in proper historical and biogeographical contexts. From 1988 to 1993, Tim Manolis led a cutting-edge effort to collect the data for a Sacramento County breeding bird atlas (BBA) that was not published. In 2015, Ed Pandolfino, Manolis, Lily Douglas, and Chris Conard decided to reanimate the zombie information by transforming it into the baseline against which to compare a new batch of data, collected from 2016 to 2020. Thus, in 2021,
Sacramento County became the first region of California to publish the results of two BBA projects (Sonoma County also completed its second round of field work in 2020, but the results are not yet published).