On February 23, 1994, the month of February was proclaimed as National Bird-Feeding Month by Congressman John Porter when he read a resolution into the Congressional Record. Four years later, in February 1998, a joint venture between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society led to the creation of the first Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC).
Not familiar with the GBBC? The GBBC was one of the first online projects to collect data on wild birds. The information is contributed by birdwatchers—casual birders, backyard birders, and more serious field birders.
This four-day event occurs each year during the President’s Day weekend. This means it starts tomorrow, Friday, February 16th, and continues through Monday, February 19th. For more information visit https://www.birdcount.org/.
The guidelines require birding for at least 15 minutes anytime during the count period, and then entering one’s observations into eBird. If someone doesn’t have an eBird account, the information can be entered into the GBBC website.
If you’ve never participated in this exercise, you might be wondering what the guidelines are for counting birds. Counting can be difficult if you are watching feeders for an extended period of time and the number of birds at your feeders is constantly changing. The general rule for counting is to report the highest number of individual bird species seen at one time during the observation period.
This rule of thumb helps to reduce overcounting, as it is very likely that you may be counting the same bird over and over again. Using white-crowned sparrows as an example, let’s say you see 12 first thing in the morning. At mid-day, you observe again and see six. Prior to dusk, when birds typically do a lot of “tanking up” for the night ahead, you see 15.
Instead of reporting the sum of your three observation periods (33), you would only report the highest number, which, in this example, is 15.
At the beginning of the year, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology issued a challenge to eBird users to submit an average of one eBird checklist per day in 2024. At first glance, this seems like an enormous undertaking. However, I’ve come to believe it is doable. Since it is an average, you don’t have to do a checklist every day.
Personally, I can go several days without doing any birding, so I don’t submit any checklists. However, there are other days when I do a fair amount of birding at different locations, and I submit an eBird checklist for each location for that day.
So far this year, I have already submitted 60 checklists in the first 44 days of the year, so I am certainly reporting, on average, more than one checklist per day. Whether I will be able to maintain this pace is yet to be determined!
I know for many people, bird identification can be challenging, so they might not feel they are capable of reporting their bird sightings. One of the goals we have in our new store location is to hold bird identification workshops—in addition to our free weekly guided bird walks—in our conference room.
Last month we had a class on raptor identification. This month, we will be having a class on shorebird identification, and in March we will have a class on birds of the Sonoran Desert. For more information on our free bird identification workshops, and our free weekly bird walks, please visit our website at www.thelookoutaz.com, or visit the store to review the schedule and sign up.
Until next week, Happy Birding!
Eric Moore is the owner of The Lookout, in Prescott, where you will find a Hallmark Gold Crown Store, wild bird products, and Vortex and Swarovski optics. Eric has been an avid birder for over 55 years. Eric can be contacted at eric@thelookoutaz.com.
