The Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) is an annual four-day event, and you don’t have to go out in the cold to look for birds and count them – you can count from your window. During the GBBC bird watchers of all ages will count birds to create a real-time snapshot of winter bird populations. The instructions are to count birds for at least fifteen minutes (or longer if you like) during any or all of the GBBC from Friday, February 15, through Monday, February 18.
Visit the official GBBC website for more information and to open a GBBC account where you will register your findings. Each checklist submitted during the GBBC helps researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society learn more about how birds are doing, how to protect them and the environment we share. Last year participants turned in more than 104,000 online checklists, creating the continents’s largest overview of bird populations ever recorded. Some results of last year’s count documented a huge “southern invasion” of Snowy Owls across much of the United States. It was believed that the Snowy Owls moved south from their usual arctic habitats in search of food.