Citizen scientists are key to tracking bird populations in North America and identifying which birds are growing in numbers and range — and which are on the decline. To explain the value of bird counts, what can be learned from the data and how anyone can get involved, joining me on the podcast this week is Project FeederWatch project leader Dr. Emma Greig.
Project FeederWatch is based at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. Emma took the reins of Project FeederWatch in the United States in 2013. Before that, she was a postdoctoral associate in Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where she studied behavioral ecology and evolution in Australian fairy wrens. Emma holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has studied birds in Australia, Malaysia and Hawaii.
Dr. Emma Greig is Cornell Lab’s project leader for Project FeederWatch. (Photo: Courtesy of Emma Greig)
Emma grew up in Michigan. Emma’s fascination with birds started when she was a kid raising zebra finches — little Australian birds that are popular at pet stores. Emma had a pair when she was 8 or 9 years old, and she was astonished when she watched the pair incubate a clutch of eggs until they hatched.
Birds and Well-being
Cornell University does amazing things to educate the public at large about how to become better stewards of our bird populations and the environments they inhabit. In addition to initiatives like FeederWatch, Cornell Lab offers Merlin, a bird ID app.
I know that much of the audience of “The joe gardener Show” are birders in addition to gardeners. It’s a natural fit, and we’re equally as attracted to the birds as we are to the plants that we grow in our gardens and landscapes.
Emma says as researchers learn more about birds and also conduct social science research, they learn more about the impact of watching birds on people’s well-being.
“That’s something that we’re starting to research more with FeederWatch data — this interplay of birds and people,” Emma says.
Bluebirds at a heated birdbath. Birdwatching is associated with improved mental health.
(Photo Credit: Judy Carlson/Project FeederWatch)
Cornell Lab
“The Lab of Ornithology is just a very rich place to work, and there are so many wonderful colleagues and people there who are doing all kinds of different work related to birds, whether it’s outreach and education, or detailed scientific research,” Emma says. “They really span the gamut of interests and expertise in ornithology. I can’t say enough how fortunate I feel to work here and how interesting of a place it is to come and visit and just be. ”
I visited the Cornell Lab of Ornithology several years ago for an episode of my television show “Growing a Greener World.” It’s the real deal and very impressive as soon as you walk in. A wall of glass looks out onto the lake and all the activity, and it’s breathtaking. A boardwalk runs through all of the habitat areas.
Just recently, the lab celebrated the reopening of its visitors center, which had been shut down for renovations. It was brought up to modern standards, and wonderful new displays have been added, Emma says.
What Is Project FeederWatch?
Project FeederWatch is a winter and spring birdwatching program that collects data from citizen scientists all over North America.
It runs from November through April, and the goal is to count the birds around your home and send the data to the lab,” Emma says.
The idea was conceived in the 1970s at Long Point Bird Observatory, the founding program of Birds Canada, which operates research, education, and training programs focused on ornithology, conservation, and other aspects of natural history at Long Point, Ontario, Canada. Long Point Bird Observatory paired up with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in the late 1980s to expand the geographic reach beyond Canada.
“It kind of sounds boring to say, ‘Oh, we’ve been counting with the same protocol for 37 years,’” Emma says. “But the beauty of it is then you have got a data set where you can compare counts from 2024 with counts from 1990 and say, how has this species, or this location — or whatever you want — changed over time? So it is an incredibly powerful data set.”
I have been a contributor myself to the data set. Cornell makes it very easy to contribute. A count can be done over a period as short as 15 minutes, though Emma says some people peek out their window all weekend and record what they see and hear.
“Because of the way the protocol is set up, it’s designed so that you don’t count the same birds multiple times,” Emma says. “So it really is flexible about the amount of time that you spend watching. And as long as people tell us how much time they spent, we can account for that in the analysis.”
To ensure the same birds aren’t being counted twice by the same observer, Project FeederWatch asks bird counters to record how many birds of the same species they saw simultaneously. That way, if a bird leaves and comes back, it’s not counted as an additional bird.
“If you saw five and then later you saw six and then later you saw two, you don’t add all those groupings up because it might, in some cases, be some of the same birds,” Emma explains. “I guess you could say it’s a conservative way of counting.”
Bird counters aren’t just counting the birds at their feeders.
“Not only do the birds not have to be on the feeder to count them, you don’t even have to have a feeder at all,” Emma says. “You can do FeederWatch just by looking at whatever your area is that you want to watch and keeping track of the birds there.”
House finches at a feeder. When counting for Project FeederWatch, watchers must take care not to count the same bird twice.
(Photo Credit: Stephen & Judy Shelasky/Project FeederWatch)
What Can Cornell Learn From Counting Birds?
The limit is your imagination as a human. What can you come up with to ask? and feeder watch might be able to answer it.
Emma says she used to think bird counts were pretty straightforward, identifying whether the population is going up, going down or stable. “But truly there is so much more that you can learn about birds from their numbers because you can overlay information about habitat, weather patterns and climate, disease dynamics,” she says. “You can overlay all kinds of other things on these bird counts to really start to learn a lot about ecology and evolution.”
There may be additional questions that haven’t been asked yet, but when those questions are finally asked, the data is there.
Bird Range Expansion and Contraction
One of the big changes that is evident from Project FeederWatch data is range expansion and contraction. That’s because the data can show not just whether populations are going up and down but also where that is happening.
The species that are expanding their ranges are, most often, warm-adapted species that are expanding to the north and west of their historic ranges. For example, Carolina wrens can now be heard singing in winter in Michigan. “You could see a Carolina wren in January,” Emma says. “Well, that seems weird, and it is weird, but we can actually see that movement over time through FeederWatch data, and it’s happening with a lot of different birds.”
Another example is the Anna’s hummingbird.
“FeederWatch didn’t discover it,” Emma notes. “There were sort of these anecdotal observations of Anna’s hummingbirds overwintering in British Columbia and Alaska, and people would send in photographs of a hummingbird on a hummingbird feeder covered in ice and snow.”
Some folks use little heaters with the hummingbird feeders so the sugar solution they put in the feeders doesn’t freeze.
It used to be the case that hummingbirds would be around in the warm seasons and then leave.
“We used FeederWatch data to very quantitatively document that northward march of Anna’s hummingbirds,” Emma says. “And the piece of it that I really thought was interesting too — and it was only through FeederWatch data that we could do this — was we looked not only at how hummingbirds were moving north, we could also look at how people’s behavior was changing. Because in FeederWatch we ask what kind of feeders you provide.”
Not only were Anna’s hummingbirds moving northward, so were hummingbird feeders. “Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? You know, it’s a little bit hard to say, but I’m sure there’s some feedback between those two things.
More people putting out hummingbird feeders could explain why hummingbirds have expanded their range.
Cardinals also present a chicken or the egg conundrum. Cardinals have expanded their range — but is it because more people have put out feeders that attracted them?
Cardinals are good at living in a human-modified habitat. Landscaping trends and habits have changed over the past few decades, and more people are providing the type of plant material that provides food, shelter and nesting habitats that cardinals prefer.
“They’re good at living with people, so even irrespective of bird feeders, I think cardinals are a species that can really thrive around humans,” Emma says. “Good for them, because there’s a lot of us around.”
A resilient cardinal enjoying seeds and orange slices in the snow, an example of how feeding birds can support them through harsh winter months. (Photo Credit: Amy Prentice)
Unfortunately, with the good comes the not-so-good. One example in FeederWatch data is the evening grosbeak.
“That is a species where we’ve seen big declines over the past decades. They’re just not thriving the way they once were. They are what’s known as an eruptive species. So some years they’ll come south in droves and people would see them all over their feeders.”
Evening grosbeaks would be seen as far south as Arizona and New Mexico.
“Over the decades they have just become less abundant, less common. Places that used to get them don’t anymore. So it really is a big decline for those guys, and I will say that the reasons for that are not entirely clear. Whether it’s due to warming temperatures, reduced food availability in the wild habitat change, it can be really hard to pinpoint what is directly causing the decline of a particular species.”
Evening grosbeaks tend to nest in boreal forests. That is an expansive habitat area for the many, many species of birds who spend a lot of time there.
A large number of winter birds such as red poles, pine siskins, evening grosbeaks, pine grosbeaks and tree sparrows that visit feeders in colder months spend the rest of the year in boreal forest, Emma points out. It’s a vast habitat, north of us and free of people, where birds raise their young.
A pine grosbeak, a winter visitor to bird feeders.
Photo Credit: Emily Ahtunan/Project FeederWatch
They Need Our Backyards
Though some species are growing in population and range, broadly speaking, the North American bird population is in decline.
Emma pointed out that migratory birds that spend half the year where we are and the other half either north or south of us need suitable habitats in both locations to survive through their whole life cycle.
“A lot of species are in decline, and whatever little things we can do in the tiny piece of habitat that we do have a little bit of control over, our backyards, I think we should try to do that,” Emma says.
A Change Spurred by Project FeederWatch
Data is compelling.
Based on citizen scientist data, FeederWatch discovered that the painted bunting population was declining in Florida. Cornell notified the authorities at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which began monitoring painted buntings.
The painted bunting population, since the 1980s, had been dropping 4% per year, and it doesn’t take long before that’s a very large number.
The painted bunting is an eye-catching bird that is categorized as “near-threatened” with a declining population.
(Photo Credit: Andrew Mills/Project FeederWatch)
Identifying Birds with Merlin
Cornell Lab’s Merlin bird ID app makes it easy to identify the birds you see in your yard or wherever you may be. Give it a few descriptors, and it narrows down the options for you based on the time of year and your location.
Emma says as much as she loves field guides, she knows it’s daunting to flip through pages with hundreds of birds. The Merlin app is a shortcut to a positive ID.
Emma doesn’t want the need to ID birds to dissuade people from participating in FeederWatch. “The average number of birds that people have around their home is a dozen,” she notes. “… You don’t have to learn 600 birds to be able to contribute to a program like FeederWatch or eBird. Just learn a handful.”
The Merlin app from CornellLab identifies birds from their chirps and songs. Bird watchers can also enter descriptions to help ID birds.
Joining FeederWatch
Those who sign up for FeederWatch get a kit of materials with a poster with bird identification and a calendar to plan count days. The fee in the United States is $18.
“That participation fee has kept the project alive for almost four decades now,” Emma says. “If we had been trying to rely on grants or donations or endowments, the program just would not be here.”
I hope you enjoyed learning about Project FeederWatch with Emma Greig. If you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Have you joined a bird count? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 20: Gardening for the Birds with Margaret Roach
Episode 071: Gardening for Wildlife: How-to Create an Inviting Habitat, with NWF’s David Mizijewski
Episode 076: How to Create a Bird-friendly Yard
Episode 227: The Humane Gardener-How to Nurture a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife
Episode 370: Bird-Friendly Gardening, with Jen McGuinness
joegardenerTV YouTube: How to Provide Water for Backyard Birds in Winter
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
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Master Home Composting Webinar | Wednesday, October 23, 2024 – 12:00-1:30PM Eastern Time
GGW Episode 512: Backyard Birds
Merlin bird ID app
Emma Greig’s Cornell Lab Bio and Publications
Project FeederWatch on Facebook
Project FeederWatch on X | @FeederWatch
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