Kancheepuram was a vast swath of land, and usually, a convenient catch-all term in eBird for citizen-science birders to lump their avian sightings south and south-west of Chennai.
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The axe then went through the district, hiving off a huge piece of it to make the Chengalpattu district. eBird was for long out of step with this development, and birders who had had an avian sighting in the Chengalpattu region would still have to list it under Kancheepuram.
For eBird users, it seemed odd to have to persist with an “address” knowing full well that it was way off the mark. But just when birders learnt to live with it, eBird has gone ahead and corrreted the anomaly and created Chengalpattu as a category, and much of the past data has been migrated to their parking place.
eBird reviewer Gnanaskandan Kesavabharathi notes that the new category is just a week old.
He explains the process. “Once the boundaries get redefined, the hotspots within them would automatically get remapped to the new category, and the data will also be migrated to it. Around 80 percent of the hotspots would have got reassigned. Areas lying in the borders of two districts might be loosely divided between them, and they will have to be visited and properly assigned.”