This image provided by Macaulay Library/Cornell Lab of Ornithology shows a mangrove cuckoo. The slender, long-tailed mangrove cuckoo, which has a large range in southern Florida, the Caribbean and Latin America, is among species likely to be spotted by participants in the Great Backyard Bird Watch, running Feb. 17-20. The global count by volunteers helps scientists studying the decline of bird populations worldwide. Scott Young/Macaulay Library/Cornell Lab of Ornithology via AP
It’s a given that when the Great Backyard Bird Count begins Friday, Steve and Janet Kistler of Hart County, Kentucky, will be joining in. They’ve done so every year since the now-global tradition began 25 years ago.
For Moira Dalibor, a middle-school math teacher a couple hours away in Lexington, this will be the first count. She’s leading a group of students and parents to an arboretum for an exercise in data-gathering.
They’re expected to be among hundreds of thousands of people around the world counting and recording over four days. Last year, about 385,000 people from 192 countries took part in the Great Backyard Bird Count, or GBBC.
“Every year we see increased participation,” and 2022 was a big jump, says Becca Rodomsky-Bish, the project’s leader at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in Ithaca, New York, which organizes the count along with the National Audubon Society and Birds Canada.
In India, which had the highest participation outside the U.S. last year, tens of thousands of people submitted bird checklists — a 28% increase from 2021.
This global data goes into the eBird database used by scientists for research on bird populations, which have declined sharply overall in past decades. It’s part of a rise in citizen science projects in which volunteers collect data about the natural world for use by researchers.
And if it gets more people interested in bird-watching, so much the better, says Steve Kistler.
“It’s fun and important to get the numbers, but…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply