Posted on Dec 17, 2016
Many of the local Field Naturalist groups are conducting their annual Christmas Bird Counts. These bird counts are conducted in partnership with Audubon’s formal process and data collection and have been taking place for over 100 years.
You can too!
Other groups besides Field Naturalist could decide to conduct their own informal Christmas Bird Counts, perhaps as simple as having your members identify and count the birds at their bird feeder on a particular day. This is a great way to get your members involved as well to capture data on local bird populations. A particularly rare bird may be spotted that would be of great interest to local experts.
Look for trends
After collecting many years of data you can begin to look for trends to see if any particular species is declining or growing. Some variations in counts may be due to climate change and your data might be useful as a climate change indicator – e.g. you may find that birds that move into your area from the north may be migrating at a later date than in previous years.
Show Results
Naturally your members that participate in the bird count would like to know the results. A great way to do this is to add the information to your website … the Bird portion of a BioBlitz capture tool could be used for this purpose – e.g click here