The top Oklahoma birder listed in last year’s Great Backyard Bird Count spotted 95 different species in a single weekend, and he achieved that rank without trying.

“Wish I could help, but to be honest, I’m not even sure how the GBBC works,” Brian Marra responded to an email interview request.

“Even if I could replace the house sparrows and starlings outside my windows with birds that actually belong on this continent, I still wouldn’t want to sit around the house staring at them. I am the opposite of a backyard birder.

Marra said the February 2022 weekend it was just another typical weekend of bird watching and using the eBird app to record his observations.

His example illustrates the new world of birding as a “citizen science” with the 2023 global event sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Audubon Society and Birds Canada approaching February 17–20, and more and more people turning from everyday clipboards and checklists to store their info in the Internet cloud with the popular eBird app.

‘Backyard’ count launched global app

The organizers of what started as a “backyard” exercise in North America in the 1990s, report 2022 results with 384,641 global participants among 192 countries, all documenting the times, locations and numbers of 7,099 different bird species on one weekend.

Public-domain citizen science apps created by Cornell have completely replaced the days of manually tabulating and sending in results via email, said Becca Rodomsky-Bish, a GBBC project leader with Cornell. In fact, the interest shown in submitting those early lists for the Great Backyard Bird Count inspired creation of the app in the first place.

“It was, ‘Hey, citizen scientists will get involved if we give them a platform,” she said. “So the Great Backyard Bird Count was a big part of the reason for developing eBird, which started in the late 1990s.”

“Backyard” was loosely defined from the beginning, she said. Some birders enjoyed in it in the literal sense of sitting in their backyard and others saw their backyard in a more global sense as their hometown or whatever places they might go to see birds on any given weekend.

It’s not to be confused with the winter-long Project FeederWatch count, also organized by Cornell, that focuses on birds that visit at-home feeders November through April, she said.

The count started in 1997, but for the past decade the count is entirely compiled through the eBird app and a companion bird-identification app called Merlin, she said.

“It was a combination of methods for awhile and as eBird was strengthened and expanded we moved to all online,” Rodomsky-Bish said. “In 2013 we pivoted to using eBird, and since that time all of it goes into the eBird database.”

How the count is tallied

People are encouraged to sign up and use eBird, and the weekend count is marked as an “eBird event” in the database, but it compiles global eBird submissions for that weekend whether eBird users specifically tagged their sightings for the event or not, Rodomsky-Bish said.

“In your app, in your personal database, you can always go back and see details,” she said. “Occasionally someone will see the GBBC note on their results and contact us saying they didn’t think they participated. It’s all just part of contributing to a public domain database.”

People in 60 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties participated — whether they knew it or not — in the 2022 count. They turned in 1,011 bird checklists that logged 155 different species across the state.

Some spotted as few as one or two species, others dozens. The top counties were Tulsa County, with 96 species logged and Oklahoma County, with 95. The top hotspot for birders was Sequoyah National Wildlife Refuge, where just two bird watchers documented 63 species.

Jana Singletary of Tulsa, the top counter for the state’s top county, logged 55 species and specifically went out that weekend to contribute to the annual count. She said she uses what the app labels a “track.”

“I set the track to begin for the Backyard Bird Count at a certain time and set it to end at midnight the next day, so you can track it all and submit it as one,” she said. “Then you can send it to yourself as an email too.”

“I try to hit as many of my favorite places as I can over the weekend of the count,” she said.

Rodomsky-Bish said the count establishes an annual data point, but overall is designed to bring awareness to what citizen science brings to global bird population trend monitoring, and to bring people closer to their environment.

“I try to stress it’s really about helping people find that spark that gets them into birding,” she said. “Whether you’re someone who loves to go birding or whether it’s something you never have done the count is something people can participate in that has this energy of the whole world coming together.”