Next weekend, 17-20 February, citizen science participants young and old and from around the world will be participating in The Great Backyard Bird Count.
Your help by observing birds in your area is needed every year to make this citizen science project successful!
Image Source
About The Great Backyard Bird Count
Image Source
The Great Backyard Bird Count was started in 1998 by the National Audubon Society and Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It was the first citizen science project online to collect and display results on wild bird counts in near real-time.
Getting Started: Creating an Online Account is FREE
To participate you will need an online account. Creating an online "eBird" account is free. If you had an account in prior years or are currently participating in Cornell Lab of Ornithology citizen science project, you can use your username and password to log in.
Observing Birds in Your Area
Your observation period must be at least 15 minutes or longer of bird watching on one or more days of The Great Backyard Bird Count, 17-20 February 2017. You may make observations in as many places and as many days of The Great Backyard Bird Count as you like.
Entering Your Bird Observations
You must submit a separate online checklist for each new day, for each new location, or for the same location if you made observations at a different time of day. You will estimate the number of individual birds of each species you observed during your count period.
To enter your observations, go to The Great Backyard Bird Count homepage and click on "Submit Observations". You can even add photographs and sounds to your online checklist entry.
You can also use the eBird Mobile app for Android or for iOS to enter your observations.
2016 Great Backyard Bird Count Statistics
Image Source
Last year, 2016, 162,052 bird observations were submitted from around the world. Participants counts 18,637,974 birds identified from 5,689 bird species.
Photo Contest
There is also a photo contest associated with The Great Backyard Bird Count with prizes for 2017. There are six categories for photos: Overall, Habitat, Behavior, Group, Composition, and People. You can enter 10 images per category. You can read the photo contest rules by clicking here.