Personal Count Summary for 2007-2008

Visit Project FeederWatch for more information and to find out
how you can become a citizen scientist and count the birds you your own backyard!

Celebrate Spring and welcome wildlife to your yard. Welcome beautiful birds, butterflies, and other friendly neighboorhood wildlife to your yard and garden.

Provide these essential elements for healthy and sustainable wildlife habitats. 

• Food Sources - Native plants, seeds, fruits, nuts, berries, nectar
• Water Sources - Birdbath, pond, water garden, stream
• Places for Cover - Thicket, rockpile, birdhouse
• Places to Raise Young - Dense shrubs, vegetation, nesting box, pond
• Sustainable Gardening - Mulch, compost, rain garden, chemical-free fertilizer

Find out how to create a certified wildlife habitat.

https://secure.nwf.org/backyard/certify.cfm?campaignid=WH08CPCRD

We have saved your bird checklist. Thank you for participating in the Great Backyard Bird Count!

We have saved your bird checklist. Thank you for participating in the Great Backyard Bird Count!

We have saved your bird checklist. Thank you for participating in the Great Backyard Bird Count!

“Jeepers, creepers, where’d you get those peepers!”
“Jeepers, creepers, where’d you get those eyes!”

(Pardon the eyes. The camera flash made the eyes glow!)

I make homemade suet for my backyard birds. Some days the birds don’t eat all of the suet. Tonight at dusk a new backyard friend couldn’t resist the suet and cleaned out the feeder!

You’ll have more fun taking part in the Great Backyard Bird Count if you first learn about the birds you’re most likely to see. We have some fun ways for you to become familiar with birds.

Visit www.birdsource.org/gbbc/kids for coloring pictures, puzzles, and games to get your kids involved in a fun and educational hobby, birdwatching.

How to do the Great Backyard Bird Count
1. Plan to count birds for at least 15 minutes during February 15-18, 2008. You can count each day or just some of the days and you can count in different places. Just be sure to keep a separate list of birds for each day and each location.

2. For each type of bird you see, count the most you see at any one time. For example, maybe you see two chickadees when you start watching, then five chickadees a few minutes later. The number you put on your list for chickadees is five. Do not add two plus five. (That way you won’t accidentally count the same bird twice.)

3. Enter your results on the Great Backyard Bird Count web site! Then watch the maps as more and more people enter their reports.

Great Backyard Bird Count http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc

This year’s 11th annual Great Backyard Bird Count, led by Audubon and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, will be held Presidents’ Day weekend, February 15–18, 2008. Anyone in the United States and Canada can count birds from wherever they are and enter their tallies online at www.birdcount.org. These reports create an exciting real-time picture of where the birds are across the continent and contribute valuable information for science and conservation.

Each tally helps us learn more about how our North American birds are doing, and what that says about the health and the future of our environment.

“The GBBC is a great way to engage friends, family, and children in observing nature in their own backyard, where they will discover that the outdoors is full of color, behavior, flight, sounds, and mystery,” said Janis Dickinson, Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

People of all ages and experience levels are invited to take part wherever they are—at home, in schoolyards, at local parks or wildlife refuges, even counting birds on a balcony. Observers count the highest number of each species they see during at least 15 minutes on one or more of the count days. Then they enter their tallies on the Great Backyard Bird Count web site www.birdcount.org.

The web site provides helpful hints for identifying birds. Participants can compare results from their town or region with others, as checklists pour in from throughout the U.S. and Canada. They can also view bird photos taken by participants during the count and send in their own digital images for the online photo gallery and contest.

“Literally, there has never been a more detailed snapshot of a continental bird-distribution profile in history,” said John Fitzpatrick, Director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Imagine scientists 250 years from now being able to compare these data with their own!”

Already, the count results show how the numbers of some birds species have changed in recent years.

For more information on how to participate, including identification tips, photos, bird sounds, maps, and information on over 500 bird species, visit www.birdcount.org.

If you travel across the continent from west to east, you will encounter different types of birds at different locations along your way. For example, you might see Western Scrub-Jays in California, Gray Jays in the Canadian Rockies, and Blue Jays in Virginia. Therefore, to interpret FeederWatch data in a meaningful way, the continent is divided into fifteen FeederWatch Regions. Each region includes a group of states and provinces that share similar geological and habitat features.

Find detailed information about your favorite backyard birds here http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/DataRetrieval/trendgraphs/index.html

Choose a bird from the drop down box and click “Go”. You’ll see graphs of the number of feeders visited and the average number of birds seen at one time for each of the FeederWatch regions.

You are probably tired of me writing about the Mourning Doves in our yard but I must tell you what happened yesterday!

We have a nest on the ledge near our front door. It’s out of the way and high enough that the birds feel safe and no one going in or out of our front door is bothered. The Mourning Doves built this nest last year and raised two baby doves. It must be a good place for a nest because we’ve had three Mourning Dove families raised there this spring and summer. The first family raised two baby birds. The second family hatched one baby bird. And the third hatching had two baby birds. I look out every morning to see how much they’ve grown.

Well, yesterday when I looked out, one of the baby birds was sitting on the ground and the other baby was in the nest with its mother. My husband and I decided to put the baby bird back in the nest, so we drug out the ladder. I picked up the baby bird and was just about to put it in the nest when the mother bird flew out of the nest and the baby bird tried to fly but fell to the ground. I was so startled that I dropped the baby bird that I was holding. By the time I climbed down the ladder we couldn’t see either baby bird and the mother bird was flapping around on the ground pretending to have a broken wing. Birds really use this defense mechanism. We looked around and couldn’t find the baby birds so went back in the house thinking that our good deed was not so good after all and a little sad that something might happend to the baby birds.

Later that day I looked out around our front door and found the two baby doves and two adult doves huddled together on the ground. I had no idea that Mourning Doves were so devoted. Somehow the adult doves had found the baby birds and hurded them together.

This morning when I looked outside I didn’t see them at first. The sprinklers had been on so the birds were forced to move. I saw two baby birds and an adult bird sunning themselves a few feet away.