Valentine’s Day marks the start of the first Great Backyard Bird Count since the release of an eye-opening report on an international “bird emergency.”
Anyone can take part in the global 23nd annual count scheduled Feb. 14-17, 2020. The first step is creating a free online account at gbbc.birdcount.org and familiarizing yourself with instructions on how to participate.
Organizers with Cornell University, Audubon and Birds Canada offer lots of tips on getting started, along with links to an online bird guide and tricky bird IDs so participants can accurately identify the species they’re counting.
Lehigh Valley participants in the 2019 count counted and identified 75 different species in Lehigh County, 83 species in Northampton County and 81 species in Warren County.
“There is no better time to get involved because we are facing a bird emergency,” organizers said in a news release. “In a study published by the journal Science last fall, scientists revealed a decline of more than one in four birds in the United States and Canada since 1970 -- 3 billion birds gone.”
The study notes that birds are indicators of environmental health, signaling that natural systems across the U.S. and Canada are now being so severely impacted by human activities that they no longer support the same robust wildlife populations, according to a news release about the findings.
“Multiple, independent lines of evidence show a massive reduction in the abundance of birds,” Ken Rosenberg, the study’s lead author and a senior scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and American Bird Conservancy, says in the release. “We expected to see continuing declines of threatened species. But for the first time, the results also showed pervasive losses among common birds across all habitats, including backyard birds.”
Of nearly 3 billion birds lost, 90% belong to 12 bird families, including sparrows, warblers, finches and swallows. These are common, widespread species that play influential roles in food webs and ecosystem functioning, from seed dispersal to pest control, according to the release.
Here is a look at instructions for the 2020 Great Backyard Bird Count, followed by a listing of the species spotted and highest count recorded during the 2019 count in the Lehigh Valley. Click here to view this article on your web browser if the following content is not displaying properly.
Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
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February 09, 2020 at 07:15PM
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Great Backyard Bird Count 2020: A primer, plus what’s been spotted in the Lehigh Valley - lehighvalleylive.com
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