Critter Geek
Great Backyard Bird Count
The tenth annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) starts today and runs through Monday; you can spend as little as fifteen minutes counting birds in a location and submit your results to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. You might even win a prize.
The real prize, of course, is the data that’s collected:
Last year, participants submitted more than 60,000 checklists – and reported 7.5 million birds overall and 623 different species. The count helped chronicle the early spring migratory routes of Sandhill Cranes, documented lingering migrants such as Orange-crowned Warblers and Tree Swallows, revealed the ongoing range expansion of introduced Eurasian Collared-Doves, and recorded declining numbers of American Crows.
NPR featured the count on Weekend Edition, and you can listen to the story online: Backyard Bird Count Enters Tenth Year
The GBBC web site is full of helpful information to get you started, including help with tricky IDs. And you can watch the counts get added to the maps online throughout the weekend!
The Great Backyard Bird Count is an example of “citizen science”, real scientific data collection collected by uncredentialed people from all walks of life. For more citizen science projects, see my other site, CitizenSci.com.
