Terry Rich
There are several opportunities every year for individuals of all ages to contribute to community science projects that involve finding, counting, and reporting birds. Each February, the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC; https://www.birdcount.org/) seeks to take a snapshot of all the birds on earth. This year the count will be over the period February 14-17, 2025.
The great thing about the GBBC is that you don’t have to go anywhere. You can literally look out your house or school windows at your feeders. Or if you don’t have feeders, just look around and count birds following the simple protocol of the program. You don’t need particular skills to participate. Just do the best you can, using the bird identification tools available.
“Backyard” does not sound very exciting or scientific. But counts of even common species over large areas and over long time frames provide data that might be useful for testing various scientific hypotheses. We don’t know what questions will emerge in the future that can be answered, for example, by Dark-eyed Junco counts and occurrence – data you can contribute from outside your patio door.
The GBBC was launched in 1998 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society. The project was the first online community science project to collect data on wild birds and to display results in real time. Birds Canada joined in 2009, greatly expanding the scope of the count.
In 2013 eBird became the data entry portal. Download the app from your favorite store. If you are just getting started in birding, there are a couple of great tools to help you identify birds. My favorite is the Merlin app (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/). By answering a few questions about a bird’s size, color, and behavior, Merlin will combine this information with the time and your location to propose a species. If Merlin’s decision doesn’t look right, it will also give you some options.
Another tool from Cornell is the All About Birds (AAB) website (https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/#). You start by selecting a species. The site then gives you basic information about that species and shows different plumages (males, females, young, winter vs breeding). It also shows some similar species so you can compare them.
Last year 7,920 species of birds were reported on the GBBC, which is around 70% of all the bird species on earth. When you consider how rare some species are and how difficult others are to reach (due to jungles, mountains, criminals, and wars), that’s pretty remarkable.
An estimated 642,003 people contributed checklists from 210 countries last year. An additional 164,740 photos, videos, and audio recordings were added to the Macaulay Library at Cornell, providing yet more information for future research projects we have not yet imagined.
The GBBC is a great entry point to the world of bird counts. Other opportunities come from the Christmas Bird Count, Project FeederWatch, Global Big Day, the Breeding Bird Survey, Climate Watch, and other regional and national community science programs. You can be part of it all!
For questions, contact Terry Rich at terryrichbrd@gmail.com.
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