Take Part in the Great Backyard Bird Count
Today begins the Great Backyard Bird Count. This Year’s bird count is February 12th thru 15th.
It’s going to be a cold weekend. We know you will be watching your feeders so you might as well assist with the GBBC. All you have to do is sit and watch your feeders for 15 minutes at a time and record your observations. It’s easy, fun and it collects important scientific data.
The GBBC which was launched in 1998 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society is essentially a worldwide online citizen-science project to collect data on wild birds and display results in near real time. Go to www.birdcount.org for complete details on how to get involved.
There are multiple ways that you can report your sightings using your mobile phone or home computer. To see the different options and find out which one will work best for you visit birdcount.org and click on the how-to participate section.
Photo taken by Graham Gerdeman.
Rare Sighting of a Western Tanager
Just one day after our last blog about recent rare bird sightings in TN I experienced a rare bird in my own yard in Pegram, TN. A beautiful adult male Western Tanager appeared at a suet feeder and has been seen intermittently since. It has been seen feeding at a platform feeder with sunflower chips and dried mealworms, too. This bird calls home areas west of Texas to the California coast up into southwestern Canada. I was totally surprised when I trained my binoculars on this bird and realized what I was seeing. There have been only a few sightings of this species in TN, one of them last winter by Wood Thrush Shop employee Eli. We must be doing something right.