The 21st annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) will be held Friday, February 16, through Monday, February 19, 2018. Sponsors include the National Audubon Society and Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Please visit the official website at birdcount.org for more information. 

Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula Birders through the years have participated in the event and contributed hundreds of checklists to this key citizen science project. Reminder you can contribute a checklist from where ever you are from Friday, February 16, through Monday, February 19, 2018.  So even if you are away from home - seeking warm weather - for those days please contribute to the project. 

Per the National Audubon Society - 

"The Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) is a free, fun, and easy event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of bird populations. Participants are asked to count birds for as little as 15 minutes (or as long as they wish) on one or more days of the four-day event and report their sightings online at birdcount.org. Anyone can take part in the Great Backyard Bird Count, from beginning bird watchers to experts, and you can participate from your backyard, or anywhere in the world.

Each checklist submitted during the GBBC helps researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society learn more about how birds are doing, and how to protect them and the environment we share. Last year, more than 160,000 participants submitted their bird observations online, creating the largest instantaneous snapshot of global bird populations ever recorded.”

If you have a checklist from the GBBC period to enter, please do so using eBird.org. eBird and GBBC are completely integrated, so data you enter in eBird will always appear in GBBC. NNAS encourages you to use eBird as your primary data entry for your bird observations throughout the year and anywhere in the world.

Have fun!

Jeff Wright