Audubon Society wants eyes to the skies for annual Great Backyard Bird Count

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the Audubon Society held its annual Christmas Bird Count. This month, they’ll ask avid avian watchers to cast their eyes to the skies once again for the annual Great Backyard Bird Count from Feb. 16-19.

In Monroeville, the local library will host a Feb. 16 count from 9 a.m. to noon to observe and record local bird populations. But anyone can take part and record their results from any location over the count’s four-day run.

The “citizen science” project is in its 27th year, and is a collaboration between the Audubon Society, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York and nonprofit Birds Canada.

Even though both counts take place within a relatively short time, Audubon Senior Director of Climate and Community Science Brooke Bateman said they serve different purposes.

“The main difference is that the Great Backyard Bird Count is more of an introductory program,” Bateman said. “You can do it anywhere, including your own backyard. The bar for entry is low, whereas with the Christmas Bird Count, we get a lot of more specific information by surveying the same general area each year. It’s a little more rigorous and you get a little more data from it.”

In Allegheny County, most of the top 10 list of commonly spotted birds is familiar, with the American crow at No. 1, followed by the European starling, American robin, rock pigeon, Canada goose, brown-headed cowbird, mallard, common grackle, wild turkey and mourning dove.

Wingfield Pines, an Allegheny Land Trust property at Upper St. Clair’s Boyce Mayview Park, yielded the most diverse array of birds, with count participants identifying 41 different species. Pittsburgh’s Frick Park, and the county’s North Park and Harrison Hills Park rounded out the locations where the widest variety of birds were spotted.

In Westmoreland County, the red-winged blackbird, house sparrow, common merganser, tufted titmouse, Northern cardinal and black vulture move into the top 10 along with the familiar Canada goose at No. 1, and starlings, crows and robins also making the list.

The most species were identified along the Westmoreland Heritage Trail between Monroeville and Murrysville, with Saint Vincent College’s lake and wetlands coming in a close second.

Bateman hasn’t spotted any ultra-rare birds, but when she and her daughter took part in their first Great Backyard Bird Count while living in Wisconsin, they got a nice surprise.

“We went out, looked up and a bald eagle was the first bird we saw,” she said.

Data from the Great Backyard Bird Count is fed into the eBird app, which Bateman said is a very valuable, global source of avian data.

“We can look at that data to see where birds are at now, and we can look at past data sets to look at things like whether people are seeing more or less birds over time,” she said. “It’s not a true population estimate, but it’s a good snapshot of how birds are doing locally. It’s really helpful.”

For more on the Monroeville Public Library’s Great Backyard Bird Count event, call 412-372-0500 or email barrosop@einetwork.net. The library is at 4000 Gateway Campus Boulevard in Monroeville.

For more on the count in other areas, see BirdCount.org.