WILDLIFE WATCHING -- Science got a boost this winter when about 60,000 bird watchers took part in the annual Great Backyard Bird Count, a four-day held  Feb. 18-21.

When tens of thousands of people watch birds and report what they see online, they create a snapshot showing the whereabouts of many hundreds of bird species across the United States and Canada. That's why this annual gold mine of information about birds has become a joint project of the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology with Canadian partner Bird Studies Canada.

This year, participants identified 596 species and filed 11.4 million individual bird observations -- collectively indicating, for instance, a spike in evening grosbeak numbers. The reports provide useful information to scientists tracking changes in the numbers and movements of birds from year to year, just as winter is about to melt into spring.

Two new species never reported to the count before included a brown shrike in McKinleyville, California, and a common chaffinch recorded in Placentia, Newfoundland and Labrador—both species well out of their normal ranges.

In Alaska, a GBBC participant observed a brambling visiting her feeder—the only one reported for all of North America.

Read on for more details.

GBBC participants also reported a surprising increase in the number of evening grosbeaks this year—the highest number of observations ever for this species during the count and an increase that isn't simply attributable to greater GBBC participation. A closer look finds this upturn especially marked in the northwestern U.S. and in Canada. This uptick is also supported by data entered so far this season from Project FeederWatch, a winter-long citizen-science project from the Cornell Lab and Bird Studies Canada.

FeederWatch data have shown sharp declines in evening grosbeaks over the past two decades for unknown reasons. Future counts may reveal if this year’s increase in GBBC grosbeak reports is a one-time fluctuation or part of a long-term trend.

For the third year in a row, checklists submitted to the Great Backyard Bird Count topped 92,000. Participants set bird checklist records in 11 states and in 7 out of 13 Canadian provinces and territories, resulting in a new overall checklist record for Canada.

To find out more about these and other trends from the 2011 count, visit www.birdcount.org and click on “Highlights of 2011 GBBC.”

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