Hi all,

This year’s Great Backyard Bird Count is this weekend! It starts on Friday and goes through
Monday—February 12-15. For anyone who
hasn’t participated before, it’s really very simple to do it. All you’re asked to do is to count birds
“somewhere” for at least 15 minutes
on any or all of those days! You can do
it from inside of your house, watching your feeders, like I do, or you can make
it an outing with family or friends and go for a short or long hike
somewhere—anywhere! Take paper and pencils
to make notes about what you see, and add binoculars and a camera to add a
little extra fun! After you have your
“list” you just go to the web page to record which and how many birds you saw
that you were able to identify. If
you’ve never watched birds before it can seem impossible to know what you’re
looking at in the beginning, but you’ll be surprised by how quickly you start
to recognize the “basic” birds in your area, and by the time you’ve done that
you’ll probably be HOOKED! There’s a
page on the GBBC site where you can enter your zip code and come up with a list
of birds that are found in your area—it’s really helpful!

For both the Oldies and the Newbies, here are links to a few
of the basic info pages.

This is the main GBBC “get started” page—with links to just
about anything you might want to find out about it.

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

Here’s the FAQs page with answers to all the basic
questions!

http://gbbc.birdcount.org/help-faqs/

And here’s a page with very specific directions about what
to do and how to do it!

http://gbbc.birdcount.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2016Updates_English_DownloadableInstructions.pdf

And one more! This is
the “2015 GBBC Summary” page. It has
info about last year’s count and shows some brief examples of how the collected
data is used. The data is used to track
bird populations to find out whether specific species are declining or
increasing, which helps determine the health of specific bird populations, It also tracks when and how birds are
migrating into “new territories” which helps give answers about climate
change. The numbers are used in a lot of
ways, for both the birds and for the humans, and in some ways they’re out
Canary in a Mine!

http://gbbc.birdcount.org/2015-gbbc-summary/

When the count first started it was just in the U. S. and
Canada, but for several years now it’s been done all over the world!

It’s Citizen Science, it’s FREE, and it’s good for the
birds! Good for the humans too, in my
opinion! Please join us!

Skybird