Volunteers are essential for this scientific project.

Every year teams of birders count every bird seen and heard within a designated 15 mile diameter circle in a single day. If you want to participate but aren't able to walk long distances, ask about birding by car or golf cart or join our feeder watch team.

Teams begin forming in October. Contact us if you are interested in participating. 

All lists will be compiled and submitted using eBird. While only one designated eBirder is required for each team, we encourage everyone to be familiar with using eBird to submit checklists. Here's a tutorial. (You can just watch from 6:25-18:25 if you don't want to know how to find new birds or places to bird, or how to review your stats, but come on, that's the best part!)

By keeping multiple eBird lists, rather than one big checklist for your entire section, you increase the detail of your CBC data and record important information to improve future counts for your section.                   

Ebird suggests to start a new checklist everytime you change your mode of transportation. Walking, then driving, then walking= 3 checklists. 

Use eBird in the field with tracking on and record only ONE WAY mileage. As always, when using eBird for a trail that is out and back, you must reduce distance by the portion of overlap. For a 2 mile trail that dead ends forcing you to return over the same path, you would reduce the distance on your checklist from 4 to 2 miles. Do NOT reduce your time. To avoid double counting, don't count any birds on the second pass unless they are new species or a higher count than you initially found. For these reasons and for a better count, we encourage teams to not back-track, to take a slightly different route back possible.

Use existing hotspots when possible, otherwise the automatic location selected by eBird is fine.

Count all birds seen INSIDE our circle. If you can positively identify birds by call, they should be included. Do NOT include birds identified only by the Merlin app's sound ID. While it generally does a great job, it sometimes lists birds that are not actually there. This is a scientific project that requires accuracy. Rare birds will require a form to be completed with highly detailed information and preferably photos. 

Please read these instructions for using eBird mobile for the CBC.

This is our chance to pick up species that were missed during the count day. If you bird ANYWHERE in the circle during the 3 days before and 3 days after the count, please submit eBird checklists and let the compiler know so you can be added to the count week trip report. This is a necessary step for your checklists to be included.