Report Alberta Wildlife & Plants - Step 1

FAQ: What is this and how does it work?

Where did you see what you are reporting?

If the location you would like to submit a report for is not listed in our options, please click here and let us know. We will add the new location to the list within 48 hours in most cases.

If you are having problems using our reporting pages, please enable session cookies in your browser. This temporary cookie lets us carry your answers to various questions to the next page so your entire report gets recorded.

What is this?

The Alberta Wildlife Database is managed by the non-profit Weaselhead Society. The database holds records of 5,494,081 animals reported from across Alberta since 1966.

All residents of Alberta are encourage to use this database to report the wildlife they see in their backyards or on their nature watching trips inside Alberta.

By reporting what you see, when you see it and where you see it, to this database you will be making a permanent contribution to Alberta's natural history. You will also be contributing to the development of local wildlife lists which are useful to a a wide range of amateur and professional wildlife observers.

How does this work?

• STEP 1 - Tell us generally where you saw it
• STEP 2 - Tell us more specifically where you saw it
• STEP 3 - Tell us what you saw
• STEP 4 - Tell us how many you saw
• STEP 5 - Tell us when and where you saw it

Who uses this information?

Readers - This website is home to Alberta's largest online community of nature lovers and backyard bird watchers. Our readers are always interested in hearing about what other people are seeing.

Neighbours - The reports submitted are compiled together into lists for every city, town, village, neighbourhood, park and natural area in the database. This allows people who are new to your area discover what they can expect to see around their new homes.

Students - Tens of thousands of students, cubs, brownies, scouts and guides from across North America use this website and its online database to learn about the basic concepts of ecology and conservation.

Tourists - Many tourists and business travelers planning to come to Calgary for conventions, business trips or holidays use this database to plan in advance where they might go birding or wildlife watching while they are in the area.

Writers - Many writers and journalists who work in the areas of nature, conservation, gardening and the environment use this database as a reference tool to keep them informed about the presence, timing and movements of wildlife in Alberta.

Privacy Protection

The Weaselhead Society is a non-profit society. We do not use your personal information for commercial gain. We do not send out fund raising requests to anyone other than society members. Therefore you can be sure that the information we gather here is used only to manage this database.

The first and last names you provide will be associated with the reports you submit so that our readers can know who made the report and can decide for themselves whether the report is likely to be accurate or not.

Your email address, however, will not be included with your report and anyone who wishes to contact you for directions or other additional information about your report will have to do so through us.

We hate spam as much as you do. So we will not give out your email address unless you give us permission to do so.

Terms & Conditions of Use

In order to maintain the baseline integrity of the data in this database, we must be able to contact the people who are using it. That is the only way we have of preventing Internet vandalism.

Therefore we must require that people reporting to the database give us such basic contact information as their first and last names and a valid email address.

In most cases, we will try to contact you immediately after your first wildlife report just to ensure that you are a real person and that the email address you submitted is valid. After that, we will leave you alone.

In some cases, however, we may not contact you until you have been submitting reports for several days, weeks or months.

In any case, though, records with invalid email addresses or incomplete names will be deleted unless previous permission to do so has been arranged. Records of unresponsive users will also be deleted as a simple safety precaution.

While we are deleting records from the database for any of the reasons above, we also ban the computer that submitted the data from submitting data in the future. This is a standard security measure that helps reduce repeated incidents of vandalism.

Should you accidentally end up on this list of banned computers please let us know and we will endeavour to correct the problem regardless of who caused the error or why.