How Birding News Are Communicated in Illinois

• IBET (Illinois Birders Exchanging Thoughts) IBET is an e-mail list for the discussion of wild birds and birding issues relating to Illinois.  IBET's mission is to promote the JOY of birding by keeping the membership updated on all rare and interesting birds and birding opportunities.  The list is administred by Sue Friscia with help from Michael L. P. Retter.  See below for additional information on IBET.
• Other Illinois-based e-mail lists include Bird Notes (Champaign area) and Central Illinois Birding (Bloomington area — Google login required).
• The Illinois Birders Forum (IBF) contains rare bird alerts, field reports, identification discussions, shared photos, and much more.
• Illinois birders who communicate in the field via Family Radio Service (FRS) radios tune them to channel 11 subcode 22.
• Many Illinois birders report their sightings to eBird, a global database of categorized bird observations used by birders, professional ornithologists, and conservation professional.
• Several local birding organizations post recent sightings by their members to their websites.  Among them are the Kane County Audubon Society and the North Central Illinois Ornithological Society.
• Blogs by birders

IBET

NOTE: The author of this page is not involved in the administration of IBET.  This information page is presented purely as a convenience to Illinois' birding community.

Subscription Management

IBET is currently available through Yahoo Groups (the name ILbirds was adopted for the list due to a name conflict, but among birders it is still known as IBET), where you can subscribe, unsubscribe, maintain a user profile, and look at current messages (members only).

You can also subscribe by e-mail: just send a blank message to and follow the instruction in the message that is returned to you.

To unsubscribe by e-mail, send your blank message to to and follow the instructions in the return message.

To contribute to the e-mail list, send your messages to .  Only current subscribers are allowed to send messages, in order to keep abuses to a minimum.  In order to minimize the size of the advertisements, you may opt to send and read your messages in text-only mode (check your e-mail program's help for instructions).

To contact the list owner personally, send e-mail to .  Please do not send any inquiries regarding IBET to the owner of this web page!

Yahoo.com is supported by advertisement, and its mailing lists are no exception.  Some ads will show up when reading IBET, unless you work with a text-only mail program.

List Rules

For contributions to the list to be distributed to all subscribers, please adhere to the following rules.  Continued disregard will lead to the expulsion from the mailing list!

• Use a descriptive but concise subject line. It will be prepended by "IBET: " by the list software.
• Sign your name, city, county (Illinois is large — we don't all know where every little burg is), and e-mail address (not everybody sees the headers).
• Restrict topic of post to wild birds of Illinois, birding in Illinois, or birders of Illinois.
• Nothing about pet birds.
• Discussions dealing primarily with habitat conservation should be held on the BCNnet mailing list, not on IBET.
• No virus alerts, scam warnings, etc.
• No attachments, especially not pictures and sounds.
• Please configure your e-mail software not to send an HTML version of your message along as an attachment.  It wastes more space, confuses some archives, and leads to more annoying advertisements.
• Minimize cross-posting to other mailing lists.

Archives

The mailing list's Yahoo homepage contains a link to the archive (Yahoo login may be required).

The last 30 days worth of IBET postings with the least amount of hassle.

A different web interface to regional maillists (including IBET), with a longer retention period and searchable by author, subject, or content, can be found on the Surfbirds.com website (follow links to Birding Resources—Email Group Archives, then scroll down to North America-Illinois and Indiana, or go directly to IBET).