If you have any fondness for birds and have any room at all for a birdfeeder, then Project FeederWatch (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/ ) is a MUST. This year's count just started!

Basically, at a nominal cost, we ‘FeederWatchers', thousands of us across North America, regularly count the birds seen at our feeders and send the information to Cornell University.  

Year in, year out, their world class Ornithology Department crunches the numbers and analyzes the movements of different species geographically, and also the long-term trends in populations and locations.

Last winter, 117,000 people were involved across all fifty states and almost every Canadian province, counting the maximum number of every species they saw at any one time. Although you might see three chickadees at one go, and later see another three, of course there is no real way of telling whether they are the same or different birds - but it is the trends from year to year that matter.

For instance, in the 2008-9 counting period,  a huge number of pine siskins were counted across the US; this 'irruption' can be compared with ones in other years, along with similar climate-related invasions such as those by the beautiful white-winged crossbill and common redpolls.

Similar habits of unrelated species - such as the Dark-Eyed Junco and White-Throated Sparrow, both ground-feeding birds that constantly flit and dance and skulk around your yard in the winter - drive the populations up and down in a remarkably similar way (see the VERY cool graph, courtesy of Project FeederWatch, of the counts seen in Southern states)

For anyone fascinated by such well-supported natural history projects, the "FeederWatch Map Room" is, frankly, amazing - you can pick a region and a bird species and see the entire trend over the last twenty-one years. It plays out before your eyes how individual counting stations - people's backyards, basically - have counted different numbers of a given bird over the years (http://watch.birds.cornell.edu/PFW/ExploreData?cmd=mapRoom)

The ‘top 25 bird species' vary year to year and region to region. Very depressingly, almost every bird seen at Hawaiian sites were introduced (native birds are almost without exception endangered - thanks to us and our cats, as I mentioned in my post ‘Cats and Choices')

The huge size of the Project FeederWatch database gives great certainty to scientific conclusions around climate change and overall population changes. As the State of the Birds report shows (www.audubon.org/chapter/nm/nm/rdac/documents/State_of_the_Birds_2009.pdf), some bird species are in real trouble. And climate changes are being reliably documented through the earlier returns of migratory species and altered distributions of temperature-sensitive birds.

We bird-lovers have, therefore, THREE responsibilities. To help add information to this database, we should get involved (and Cornell offers other ‘Citizen Science' projects too - see http://www.birds.cornell.edu/).

And we need to act locally and globally.

1. Locally - by making our neck of the woods hospitable to wildlife (see earlier blogs and the wonderful web site by Audubon, www.audubonathome.org/yard/index.html).
2. ..and globally - by campaigning. ....Join Audubon Action (www.audubon.org/campaign/index.html). ..and of course, use NRDC's Action Center (www.nrdc.org/action/)...

... because our individual voices, added together, can move mountains for wildlife.

Campaigning for a better world for the least species amongst us.