LAWRENCE, Kansas — Raucous chirping tipped me off to the tree full of birds in my front yard last weekend.
I opened the door and peeked out.
House sparrows seemed to be squabbling in our cherry trees. A lone starling sat among them, unperturbed. Somewhere nearby, a tufted titmouse sang an early morning tune.
Ornithologists hope next time you peek out your door, stroll around the block or visit a nearby park, you’ll take note of the birds you see and report them to one of the world’s biggest citizen science projects: eBird. It’s basically scientists crowdsourcing data with help from birdwatchers.
The massive database operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology contains nearly 1 billion bird sightings, reported by volunteers and scientists around the globe.
This weekend is a kind of annual PR blitz — The Great Backyard Bird Count — designed to hook you on noticing, identifying and reporting the flighty fauna in your area to help scientists and the animals they study.
Over the course of four days, people will report tens of millions of birds from thousands of species in pretty much every country on the planet.
Literal backyard counts are welcome, but so are tallies logged farther from home.
Finding the bird of your dreams
The number of people using eBird jumped nearly 40% in 2020, likely buoyed by a yearning for safe pastimes amid a pandemic.
All that data helps scientists track changes in bird populations and create detailed migration maps, species by species.
For newbies interested in helping, Cornell recommends trying its Merlin smartphone app before eBird. Merlin has photos, and helps you whittle down options to figure out exactly what landed on your windowsill.
The eBird app has no photos. But it lets you track what you’ve seen over time and tell scientists exactly where and when that osprey turned up, for example, or how many purple finches visited your feeder today between 8 a.m. and 8:15 a.m.
I tried both apps over the past few weeks and toggled back and forth: Merlin for help IDing and eBird to log my reports.
Here’s the real fun: eBird shows you what other people spot and where. Eager to see a belted kingfisher dive headlong into water after a fish? Birders have reported three in Johnson County in the past week. That juicy info is a start.
