Step outside today and participate in a global effort to count birds. The Great Backyard Bird Count started February 17 and runs through February 20, 2023. The goal is to gather data on the number of birds from citizen observers like you and me all over the world.
The the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) was launched in 1998 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society . It was the first online citizen-science project  to collect data on wild birds and to display results in near real time. Birds Canada joined the project in 2009 to provide an expanded capacity to support participation in Canada. In 2013, it became a global project when observers began entering data into eBird, the world’s largest biodiversity-related citizen science project. Think of it as a bird version of the City Nature Challenge, which we’ve reported on in the past. (BTW, that’s coming up again in April 28-May 1, 2023.)
When we went outside earlier this morning, we found these guys enjoying our swimming pool, so we snapped a photo and loaded it up to Merlin Bird ID app. The app helps you identify a bird and makes the data available to researchers all over the world, very similar to iNaturalist.
It takes a few minutes to set up an account, but once you do it, you can spend the rest of the morning looking for birds! If you’re a bird enthusiast and you know what you’re looking at, you can upload several birds at one time. If you don’t have all morning, it’s OK, the organizers of the Great Backyard Bird Count only for 15 minutes. Fair warning, though, once you get started it’s kind of fun, and you might want to spend the whole morning watching birds. And if you don’t have a backyard, you can observe birds in a local park or wilderness area.
The folks at GBBC estimated that 385,000 people participated in last year’s count. They reported more than 7,000 species from 192 countries. Many GBBC participants discover a new fascination with birds and enjoy exploring (and comparing) results from around the world.