The Great Backyard Bird Count is One Week Away!

Welcome back fellow bird watchers.  Dust off your binoculars, cameras and bird identification skills.  See how many different species you and your family can observe over a four day period.  Teach your children all about birds.  The possibilities are endless.  It can all be done in as little as fifteen minutes.

The Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) starts on Friday, February 14th and runs through Monday, February 17th.  It is sponsored by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Adubon.  Following is a link to get you started plus a screen shot of the web page.

http://gbbc.birdcount.org/get-started/    

There are three easy steps to get started.  There are even mobile apps that can be installed and used on your smartphone to record your data.  The complete instructions can be found using the above link. There is an online bird guide to help you identify the more difficult species.

There is also a photo contest so you can have fun capturing photos of your favorite birds.

You may be thinking that you don't have enough time to participate.  If you can spare 15 minutes on any one of the four days, that is all you will need.  The minimum observation time is 15 minutes. You can do multiple observations each day if you want and submit a checklist for each observation. Observe at home in your backyard, or at your favorite park, or anywhere in the world.

Snowy Owl. (Photo by Ian H. Neilson, Alberta, CA, GBBC 2013)

You also may wonder how to count the birds when they are in constant motion and how to ensure you don't count the same bird twice.  Again, no worry since you count the maximum number of a species that you see at any one time during your observation period.  So if you see two chickadees at 9 AM and four at 9:15 AM, then your count for chickadees would be four, assuming you did a fifteen minute observation.

The GBBC was launched in 1998 and was the first citizen-science project which collects data on wild birds. "In 2013, Great Backyard Bird Count participants in 111 countries counted 33,464,616 birds on 137,998 checklists, documenting 4,258 species—more than one-third of the world’s bird species!"

So join the fun.  Until next time.