Someone looking at the GBBC results might be startled to see the American Robin numbers reported from the Tampa area.  We get calls and emails about these numbers all the time.  Surely they are a mistake we are told. 

Rest assured, there really are that many birds out there.  Check out a recent Tampa Bay Online story about this huge roost of robins in a mangrove swamp.  Very cool!  Thanks to the GBBC, we are able to track robins and other birds all across the country and find out more about these great congregations of birds.

Emperor Geese on Shemya Island, AK

A note from Bob Trotter:

A short note on Shemya's first GBBC. I went out 3 days with varying degrees of poor weather. Today I finally had the visibility to use the spotting scope and see Red-faced Cormorant on a near island. Snowdrifts and wind kept me from accessing the majority of beach roads. Rock sandpiper numbers were the big surprise, counted 566 from several photos. The highest number in the past was 193.

If you enter a sighting that is rare for your area, or an unusually large number of a common bird, you will be asked to confirm it as our first effort to guard against data entry mistakes.  Then we have volunteer regional reviewers who check up on these reports to make sure they aren't misidentifications.

If your report isn't showing up yet on the website, it means one of these volunteer reviewers still needs to take a look at it.  Nobody is rejecting your record, in fact we don't delete any record we get.  We are just trying to make sure the count is as accurate as possible. 

And as with anything dealing with volunteers, sometimes it takes a little longer than it would if we could pay someone to do this as a job! 

So thanks for your patience as our reviewers do their work.  Nobody is questioning anyone's integrity or skills  here, we're just trying to get an accurate bird count.

To that end, if you see anything that looks fishy on the count, feel free to send a note with your concern to citizenscience@audubon.org and we'll forward it to your regional reviewer.

Thanks for your help in making this count as accurate as possible.

Barry and Jennifer Horton were out driving around doing a bird count near their home when they found this great bird.  See photos here.  You never know what you are going to find in your own neighborhood until you look.  So go out and look!

The best way to see which species have already been reported, and which ones are still missing, is to go to Results: Maproom. 

There you can see which species were reported each year of the count, including the current count. 

It goes without saying, that if you know where to see a species that is still missing from the count, head on out and get it!

Craig Newmark of Craigslist has posted his GBBC list on his blog.  Check it out at Cnewmark.com.

This morning I spent a bit of time going through the bird photos submitted to the GBBC photo contest.  Since we get thousands of photos, we can't put them all up on the website, but we try to get up as many as we can. 

The first step in choosing photos to go up is to take a look and find those that stand out from the rest...maybe its a great shot of a common bird doing something interesting, or maybe its a photo of a bird we don't get to see that much. 

Maybe it's just something beautiful!

I liked this mockingbird picture because it is an action pose of a bird in a human-dominated landscape like a yard, reminding us that birds are everywhere!

After choosing some photos to put on the public GBBC photos page, we make sure the birds are identified correctly.  Sometimes that's a bit tricky, as we all know!

After the photos are chosen and reviewed, a copy is moved from our photo database onto the website for everyone to enjoy.

Since judging photos is a admittedly a subjective enterprise, and we have to go through thousands of photos to post several hundred online, please don't be offended if your photo doesn't show up on the website. 

Even if one of our reviewers doesn't select it to show up on the website, it is still entered in the contest.  The judges of the contest are not the same as the photo reviewers during the count, so its still a wide open competition, no matter what makes it onto the website initially!

Clare Kines, our GBBC regional reviewer in Nunavut is sweetening the pot.  Anyone in Nunavut who participates in the GBBC this year will be entered to win a copy of the book Birds of Canada.

More details online at Clare's blog.

Audubon's recent report on Birds and Climate Change shows how global warming is causing birds to shift where they live and also how important volunteer bird counts are to help us keep track of these movements.

The Great Backyard Bird Count is another tool that can help us keep track of how birds respond to climate change.  While it takes many years of bird sightings to conclusively show how birds are responding, this year we will collect bird sightings from across North America for the 12th year.  

In fact, the GBBC may be better poised than the Christmas Bird Count to help us see some of the impacts of climate change, including:

Early Migration:  Since it takes place over a month after the Christmas Bird Count, the GBBC gives us a look at the early migration of birds including Sandhill Cranes, Tree Swallows, and Purple Martins.  If global warming leads these birds to migrate earlier than they used to, we will catch this on the GBBC.

Overwintering Birds:  On the Christmas Bird Count sometimes its hard to know if a bird that is supposed to be much farther south is just a late lingerer or if it is overwintering in the area.  By February, when we do the GBBC, these birds are clearly overwintering rather than migrating late.

Small-scale local shifts:  While the Christmas Bird Count gives us information on birds in over 2,000 count circles (mostly in North America), the Great Backyard Bird Count can give us counts of birds from anywhere in North America.  The GBBC isn't limited by count circles, it is only limited by the number of people participating.

While the Christmas Bird Count is clearly a critical and invaluable tool--with over 100 years of data and statistical methods worked out so that we can use the data to track bird population trends, as we work with the GBBC, develop ways to analyze its results, and continue to add counts and improve its geographic coverage, it will become another useful tool in monitoring climate change and its impacts on birds.

So help us track global warming by getting out and counting those birds with your friends and family on the Great Backyard Bird Count!

A Google Blogsearch currently returns 5,510 hits for Great Backyard Bird Count 2009.  If you haven't posted something on your own blog yet, don't be the last one!

On Friday (Feb 6) Audubon VP of Bird Conservation Dr. Stephen Kress joined Martha Stewart on her show.  In addition to talking about feeding birds, they discussed the GBBC coming up next weekend.  See notes here. 

Video available online here. (Just do a search for "Kress" and it should come up).

If you are a Twitter user, you can post your GBBC adventures and follow other GBBC participants as we get ready for the GBBC and during the actual count weekend.  Just use the #gbbc hashtag at the end of your tweets.

You can even join the 2009 GBBC Twitter Group.

Follow GBBC Tweets here

Now that football season is over, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist Mike Seate is telling folks, Don't go stir crazy, get out and count birds!

This past year we lost Robin Carter, our GBBC regional bird sightings reviewer for South Carolina who passed away in November (see obit online here).

Our network of over 100 regional reviewers across the U.S. and Canada do a great job keeping our count as accurate as possible.  We're sad to lose Robin, but join his family and friends in celebrating his contribution to the GBBC and the birding community.  He will be missed.

I just had someone ask me if the GBBC is showing a decline in birds this year, since last year we had over 11 million individual birds reported, and this year we're at less than 10 million.  I haven't done any real analysis of the bird sightings yet, but don't think we should be worrying too much.

Here's why.

Last year there was a huge flock of American Robins in west Florida, and over 2.5 million robins were counted there (the same flock counted a couple times).  This year we have just over 500,000 robins reported across the whole continent.  So the overall count last year was influenced by this huge flock of robins.  This year, there weren't any huge flocks of robins reported on the count.  That doesn't mean that robin numbers were down.  Maybe there weren't any huge flocks anywhere, and birds were scattered where they are harder to count.  Or maybe there was a big flock somewhere that nobody counted.  Its hard to know.

So the short of the story is, that the overall number of birds counted is not a good indicator of how many birds may or may not be out there.  Its more an indicator of how many people are counting.  Or in the case of the robins, an indicator that sometimes there are just spectacular things going on out there!

Last night around 11pm I watched the number of GBBC checklists submitted totals pass last year's record of just over 81,000 checklists.  With a couple more days to enter bird sightings, we've already set a new record for checklists submitted.

About the same time I also got a report of two White-tailed Ptarmigan seen during the GBBC at Vail Pass in Colorado.  That turned out to be species number 624 for the count, setting another new record for number of species seen on the GBBC.

Thanks to everyone who has participated so far, and congratulations on another record-setting GBBC!

One great way to see how the species lists compare from one year to another is to look at the Browse Maps page of the Map Room.  There you can see which species were reported each year on the GBBC.  By scanning down this list, you can see which birds were missed this year, as well as species reported on the GBBC for the first time this year. 

New species on the GBBC so far this year include Scarlet Ibis, Ivory Gull, Black-tailed Gull, Masked Duck, Northern Jacana, Great Skua, Olive-sided Flycatcher, and Akohekohe. 

Hello everyone

Well we had another very successful GBBC. There was some concern we would fall far short of our species total, but we pulled a proverbial rabbit out of our collective hats and ended up with 62 species, only 4 short of our 2007 record of 66 species.  We were well covered for province, and am very very pleased with the participation this year. We had some nice highlights which saw Saskatoon capture the Bohemian Waxing capital of the galaxy, we ended up with over 11,000 individuals, including 2 flocks of 4000 and 1500 respectively. Common redpoll numbers were above average, and Evening Grosbeaks…well they staged one of their best appearances in recent memory, nice to see. We ended up with 144 Eurasian Collared-doves, but some most likely some were counted several times of the weekend, but other locations where they are known to be did not report.

It was a great weekend and am looking forward to next years count

Every year the good folks doing the GBBC get blessings from God, the Cosmos, or however else you see it.  Latest case in point, Mike of 10,000 Birds and his GBBC Miracle.  Read all about it here. 

Hope y'all were able to enjoy your own GBBC miracles.  If you haven't entered your GBBC sightings yet, do it now and get even more of that good karma for yourself.

Last September, a family of three Bean Goose showed up at Shemya Island in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.  They've been there ever since.  Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anybody saw them during the GBBC, so we can't count them.  The only birder stationed on the island and likely to have seen them left the island right before the GBBC for a much needed vacation.  The birds were last seen February 10.  So while they were most assuredly still on the island during the GBBC, unfortunately we couldn't get them on the count!

There are other rare birds that were reported during the GBBC, and fortunately we'll be able to get them into the count--since someone actually saw them.  There are other rare birds that have been around lately that we're still trying to determine if anyone saw during the count.  Hopefully, somebody saw the Crescent-chested Warbler and Eared Trogon that have been hanging out in Madera Canyon this winter, though it snowed up that canyon during the count weekend!  We're still missing reports of many resident birds that had to be around during the count as well, including Gunnison Sage-Grouse, Lesser Prairie Chicken, and White-tailed Ptarmigan.  There's also a whole slew of native Hawaiian honeycreepers that are only rarely reported during the count.  If anyone wants to fund an expedition, maybe we can go find those birds in person next year!

It is always fun to see if we can round up sightings of rare or less-often seen birds.  And if we can't, to at least know that they are out there.  Somewhere.  Perhaps waiting to be counted next time!

Whew!  Thanks everyone for a great count weekend.  Hope everyone had fun. 

We're pretty much on track with where we were last year with checklist submissions.  With 60,000 turned in so far, there are at least another 20,000 or so to go.  Everyone has until the end of the month to get their checklists in, but don't procrastinate!  If you haven't submitted all your counts for each day yet, do it as soon as you can.

What if you're done?  You've submitted a count for every bird you saw every place you went each day last weekend.  Well, for one thing you can help us reach our previous record of 623 species counted by helping us round up sightings of birds that were seen last weekend but not reported yet to the GBBC.  If you know of birds that others saw last weekend, that don't show up on the count for your state, province, territory, or the whole count, encourage the original observers to submit a count for that species.  If you can't get them to do that, send us an email and let us know the details of the sighting and we'll see what we can do!

Here's to a great count last weekend, and a great finish over the next two weeks!

The first year I worked on the GBBC (2005), I saw on the map that we didn't have any sightings from Nunavut.  I scrambled around and finally found Clare Kines's blog.  Not only did he submit a sighting of the only bird really around his place up there in the frozen north (Common Raven), he also volunteered to help us review any unusual reports that might show up from there as well.

Clare is a retired member of the R.C.M.P living in Arctic Bay Nunavut, on the north end of Baffin Island at 73 degrees North. Raised in Roblin Manitoba (it only seems as though he was raised by Ravens) he spent 24 years with the RCMP before retiring and building and operating a Bed and Breakfast along with his wife, Leah, in Arctic Bay.  He is thrilled that he was able to double the CBC species total in Arctic Bay this year... to two.  He spends much of his birding energy watching Corvus corax.

This year we're still hoping to get more species and checklists from Nunavut, as of right now, its all ravens!

If you are reading this before midnight on Monday of the count, especially if you haven't counted yet, turn off the computer and go over to a window or go outside and count some birds!  While you have until the end of February to enter your count, you have to actually do the count by the end of today (Feb 18).  So, go out and count some birds.

We can always use more counts of owls, so if you know you have owls in your neighborhood, tonight might be a good night to take your sweetie or kids out to look for them.  If you have a recording of an owl call, you can play it and the birds will often answer or come close to investigate.  For more info on owling, check out owling.com.

Well, darkenss has come and Day 3 is over for the province. We have logged 50 species so far, 7 more than yesterday, but still way off the mark of last years record of 66 species. Many people from many communites are participating, including some new locations...welcome everyone. We are now over 10,000 Bohemian Waxwings, with no other community in North America even close to our numbers. Other notables are Evening Grosbeaks with their best showing in recent memory, today they were reported from several new locations. We are now over 100 Eurasian Collared Doves, this is nice to see as we have had a very harsh winter, with temperatures plunging to -50C for days and days on end a few weeks ago, and temperatures in the province have been bitter since November. For them to survive our winter this year should bode well for a good breeding start, this species was also noted for the first time in Regina. We have one more day to go to find 16 new species, but I am not sure we will be able to pull a rabbit out of our hat this time, but miracles do happen.

Have a great productive and fun day 4, and for those of you like us, have a great holiday Monday

Every year, we find a few really rare birds during the Great Backyard Bird Count.  My favorite story so far is of the first state record Ivory Gull found on Saturday in South Dakota.  Check out the photos online here.

About three years ago, Rob Fergus asked me to take over as regional reviewer for the District of Columbia, and I have been doing it ever since. DC is one of the easier assignments since relatively few checklists are submitted (only 64 last year) and the city is geographically compact. No records have been flagged so far for DC, so my job has been watching for potentially-confused species.

This year DC seems to be behind last year's pace in terms of checklists submitted and species reported. The highlight so far is Red-breasted Nuthatch, reported on the GBBC in DC for the first time since 2003. I used to enjoy seeing these northern cousins of the local White-breasted Nuthatches on my winter walks in DC's National Arboretum.

In my hometown of Highland Park, NJ, large flocks of blackbirds returned about a week prior to the GBBC. We usually see them early in the morning when they circulate around the various yards with bird feeding stations. On most mornings, Common Grackles have predominated, but this morning Brown-headed Cowbirds seemed most numerous.

Hey, it happens to all of us.  Our fingers move faster than our brains.  We space something.  We make a mistake when we enter our GBBC sightings or even when identifying a bird.  What do you do if you make a mistake on the GBBC?

First of all, the only way we can change the checklist you submit is to delete it or delete the report of a species on it.  So, here's what you do:

1) Go ahead and submit a new checklist, but just with the count of the actual bird you saw.

2) Send an email to us (use the contact us link at the bottom of the GBBC page) asking us to delete the mistake.  It is best if you can give us the following info--your submission number, your location, the email you used to submit your checklist, and what species to delete.

That's pretty much it.  We'll forward your request to our regional reviewers and ask them to delete the mistake from your original checklist.

Parents who have little children know that if the kid keeps throwing his food on the floor to get attention, the best thing to do is just ignore it, and not to encourage it by picking up the food over and over.

Here at the GBBC, we'd love to ignore some similar juvenile pranks, so as not to encourage it.  But since a few folks use the bad behavior of others to go on birding email lists and question the validity of the GBBC, we have to respond in public.

Every year, some prankster somewhere enters a bogus checklist of outrageous sightings, and folks on local birding email lists think this means the GBBC is broken or worthless.  But rest assured, we generally find these problems and though it takes valuable time, our volunteer bird sightings reviewers eventually get to them and delete the bogus reports.  So, the GBBC is not broken.  We just have a few crackpots out there who think it is funny to make someone waste their time cleaning up after their mess.