The Great Backyard Bird Count: How to Take Part in 15 Minutes

Four days every February, anywhere in the world, fifteen minutes minimum. No registration, no fee, no expertise required. It is the easiest piece of real science a gardener can contribute to.

What it is

Started in 1998, jointly run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the National Audubon Society and Birds Canada. It was the first online citizen science project to collect and display bird records in real time, and it now draws hundreds of thousands of participants across more than 200 countries.

Why February? Because it sits just before spring migration begins in the northern hemisphere. Winter distributions are still stable, so a four-day global snapshot captures where birds actually are before everything starts moving.

Taking part, in five steps

1. Pick a spot. Your garden, a window, a balcony, a park bench, a footpath. It does not have to be a backyard despite the name.
2. Watch for at least 15 minutes. Longer is fine. More sessions are better than one long one.
3. Count each species using the rule below.
4. Submit through Merlin Bird ID or eBird — both free, both from the Cornell Lab.
5. Repeat as often as you like, in as many places as you like. Each session is its own checklist.

Merlin or eBird?

Start with Merlin. Its Sound ID is genuinely remarkable — it listens and names the birds singing around you in real time, which is both the fastest way to learn and the fastest way to find birds you would otherwise have missed entirely.

A pair of binoculars is the one piece of kit that changes how much you can record, and close focus matters more than magnification in a garden — see binoculars for backyard bird watching.

Counting well

• Count what you are confident of. An honest short list beats a padded long one. Researchers can work with “I saw four species”; they cannot work with a guess presented as a record.
• Use the app’s ID help rather than guessing from memory.
• Note unusual sightings carefully — eBird will flag anything out of range for your area and ask for details, which is the system working correctly, not an accusation.
• Separate checklists for separate sessions, and for separate locations.
• Include the common birds. House sparrows and starlings matter to the dataset exactly as much as something rare. Abundance data is the point.
• Do not bait or disturb birds to improve your list.

A feeder camera makes identification easier on the species that will not sit still — see wireless bird feeder cameras — and a shallow bath brings in species a feeder never will: bird baths.

Making your garden worth counting in

Not required — but if you want more to see:

• Feeders out and clean, with a mix: black oil sunflower, nyjer, suet, peanuts
• Open water, which is harder for birds to find than food in a freeze and draws species feeders do not
• Cover — dense shrubs, an evergreen, an unswept brush pile
• Seed heads left standing from last year’s perennials and grasses
• Cats indoors, which helps the count and helps the birds
• Sit still. Fifteen quiet minutes at a window sees far more than fifteen minutes wandering about

Why the data matters

Bird populations move, and they have been moving faster in recent decades. A four-day snapshot from hundreds of thousands of locations supports work on:

• Range shifts as climate changes
• Population trends, including the well-documented declines in North American birds
• Irruption years, when northern finches push unusually far south
• Disease spread, such as outbreaks of house finch eye disease
• Weather impacts, where a severe freeze in one region shows up immediately in the data

No research team could collect this. That is the whole idea: a very large number of people watching for fifteen minutes produces something no amount of funding buys.