Kendall and I have become increasingly interested in birds - in part because of the influence of our friends, Mort & Lysa, who are avid birders and in part because we added bird feeders to our back and front yards during the winter of 2020-21 which have become excellent sources of entertainment. Thus when the Great Backyard Bird Count rolled around this year, we did not hesitate to jump on board!
The eBird folks kindly offered a webinar on how to go about participating in the count - and it turns out that a) it's not limited to your backyard (Yay! We could explore!) and b) a counting period need only be at least 15 minutes in length (Double yay! We could do many mini counts!).
A little background on the GBBC: it was one of the first online projects to collect information on wild birds (it celebrated its 25th anniversary this year) and was also instrumental in the creation of eBird in 2002. The GBBC creates a 4-day snapshot of bird populations around the world; this year that snapshot took place from February 18-21 and involved 320,000 people posting their sightings from 253 subregions of the world.
Our Vaughan & Miller bird count covered our back & front yards (bird feeder gatherings including house finches and black-capped chickadees in back and downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers in front), Littleton’s Sterne Park (a whole lotta geese & ducks including one hooded merganser), and Boulder’s Bobolink Trail (mostly red-winged blackbirds and black-capped chickadees, one magpie, some Canada geese flying overhead, and two hawks – one red-tail and one too far away to tell).
All in all, a very fine endeavor and a great excuse to get out and about, peer at the sky, scrutinize trees and bushes, and revel in birdsong!
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| Our backyard feeder |
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| Again our backyard feeder - busy! |
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| Front yard |
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| Cute couple at Sterne Park |
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| Lovely Merganser |
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| Red-tailed Hawk along the trail |
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| One of many Black-Capped Chickadees flitting through the bushes along the trail |
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