The 15th annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) will be held February 17-20, 2012. The GBBC is an annual four-day event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of where birds are across the U.S. and Canada. Please visit the official website at www.birdcount.org for more information.
Anyone can participate, from beginning bird watchers to experts. It takes as little as 15 minutes on one day, or you can count for as long as you like each day of the event. It’s free, fun, and easy—and it helps the birds.
Participants count birds anywhere for as little or as long as they wish during the four-day period. They tally the highest number of birds of each species seen together at any one time. To report their counts, they fill out an online checklist at the Great Backyard Bird Count website.
As the count progresses, anyone with Internet access can explore what is being reported from their own towns or anywhere in the United States and Canada. They can also see how this year’s numbers compare with those from previous years. Participants may also send in photographs of the birds they see. A selection of images is posted in the online photo gallery.
Each checklist submitted by these citizen scientists helps researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society learn more about how birds are doing – and how to protect them and the environment we share. Last year, participants turned in more than 92,000 checklists online, creating the continent’s largest instantaneous snapshot of bird populations ever recorded.
Statistics from 2011
Total Checklists Submitted: 92,218
Total Species Observed: 594
Total Individual Birds Counted: 11,471,949
The most numerous bird counted in the 2011 GBBC was the European Starling—a species that was entirely absent from North America before the late 19th century. One hundred birds were introduced in New York’s Central Park in 1890 and 1891. According to The Birds of North America Online, the descendants of these few birds now total more than 200 million and are distributed across the entire continent.
The American Robin was the second most numerous species reported this year with more than 800,000 reported from Florida—for the third year in a row, the site of a massive roost near St. Petersburg. Overall, GBBC participants made 1,044,346 observations of robins this year.
