Backyard Bird Count shows the power of citizen science
It’s a given that when the Great Backyard Bird Count begins Friday, Steve and Janet Kistler of Hart County, Kentucky, will be joining. They’ve done so every year since the now-global tradition began 25 years ago.
For Moira Dalibor, a middleschool math teacher a couple hours away in Lexington, it 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, Feb. 17-20. 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, said 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.
That 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, said Steve Kistler.
“It’s fun and important to get the numbers, but it’s just a joyful thing to do,” said Kistler, 71, who leads bird-watching trips near his home and abroad.
Many bird-watchers use eBird year-round, and it has collected huge amounts of data — often between 1 million and 2 million bird checklists a month from around the world in the past couple of years, said Rodomsky-Bish.
Those numbers help researchers track the ups and downs of various species, which then helps determine the direction of conservation efforts.
“The net number of birds around the world — we’re losing them,” said Rodomsky-Bish.
A 2019 study by Cornell researchers found there were 3 billion fewer birds in North America than in 1970.
“The bad news is that the declines are coming out strong and hard in the data,” Rodomsky-Bish added. “The good news is if we didn’t have that data, we wouldn’t know. And that helps a lot of areas take direct action.”
The pandemic contributed to the surge in interest in the GBBC and birds in general, she said.
“Birds were company during this period of isolation,” she said, and observing them “is an accessible way to connect with the natural world. Birds are everywhere. You don’t have to leave your house. They will come. … And they’re charismatic. They’re fun and fascinating to watch.”
Compared to other counts — including Audubon’s 123-yearold Christmas Bird Count and the Cornell Lab’s Project FeederWatch — the GBBC is accessible to beginners.