Attracting Birds

Citizen Science for Feeder Watchers

Your feeder is a monitoring station that happens to be outside your kitchen window. Here is what the main projects ask for, what they have actually produced, and the one counting rule that trips up every beginner.

There is a version of bird feeding that stops at enjoying the birds, and that is a perfectly good version. There is also a version where the twenty minutes you already spend at the window becomes a data point in a continental dataset, at no extra cost and very little extra effort. The second version is what people mean by citizen science, and feeder watchers are unusually well placed for it because feeders concentrate birds at a fixed place that somebody checks regularly all winter.

The data is not decorative. Feeder-based observations have tracked the spread of a novel bird disease across a continent, documented range shifts, and recorded irruption years for northern finches. Those are things no professional survey network could do, because no research budget covers a hundred thousand observers watching the same yards for thirty years.

This page covers the main North American projects, what each asks of you in season, time and money, what the data has been used for, and then a practical walkthrough of your first count including the counting rule that almost everyone gets wrong the first time.

Project FeederWatch#

FeederWatch is the flagship for people who feed birds. It is run jointly by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Birds Canada, it runs from November 1 through April 30, and it is built entirely around counting birds at a feeding station over two consecutive days.

It is the only project on this page with a participation fee. That is about $18 for United States residents, which covers the handbook, the calendar and the running of the project; Canadian participants join by donating any amount to Birds Canada. The schedule is flexible: you may count as often as once a week or as rarely as once all winter, for as long or as short a period as you like on your count days.

What the data has been used for is the strongest argument for joining. When house finch eye disease appeared in the eastern United States in the mid-1990s, FeederWatch and the associated House Finch Disease Survey tracked the epidemic's spread through the eastern house finch population using tens of thousands of monthly report forms from ordinary participants, and later documented the disease appearing in dozens of other species, most often in the American goldfinch, purple finch and house sparrow. The disease itself, and what it means for your feeders, is covered in house finch eye disease. FeederWatch data has also been used for winter range and abundance work, including the northward and westward shifts in where common feeder species spend the winter.

The Great Backyard Bird Count#

The GBBC is four days each February, it is free, and it asks for a minimum of 15 minutes of watching on at least one of those days. It is global, and it is run by the Cornell Lab, the National Audubon Society and Birds Canada.

It is the right first project for almost everyone. There is no fee, no registration beyond a free account, no commitment past a quarter of an hour, and no season-long obligation. You submit through the eBird website or the eBird Mobile app if you are comfortable with counts, or through the Merlin Bird ID app if you are still learning names. It also lands in the middle of winter, when feeder traffic is at its peak and the birds are easy to see through bare branches.

eBird, the system underneath the rest#

eBird is free, year-round and worldwide, and it is the checklist database that the GBBC and much else feeds into. A checklist is a record of what you saw, where, when, for how long, and how far you traveled. A stationary count from a kitchen chair is a perfectly valid checklist, and a yard list built up over years is genuinely useful data on local timing.

eBird asks one thing of you above all: report only birds you can confidently identify. That applies to sound as much as sight, and it is the reason the bird song and ID apps page is emphatic that an app suggestion is a hypothesis rather than a result. If you record something unusual, eBird will ask for details, and photographs or recordings make the record far more useful. Rarities go through a regional review process staffed by volunteers, and helping them do their job is part of participating.

NestWatch, if you have a nest box#

NestWatch is the Cornell Lab's nest monitoring project and it is free. You read a short code of conduct, take a brief online quiz to be certified, then find active nests and record what happens: dates, egg counts, hatching, fledging. Nests in a nest box are the easiest to monitor because you can see in without disturbing much.

The protocol has a welfare core to it. Visits are made every three to four days rather than daily, you never handle eggs or young, you do not visit in bad weather or near dusk, and you leave promptly. Following it is the point: the protocol exists so that thousands of amateur nest checks generate comparable data without harming the nests. If you cannot manage that cadence, weekly checks still contribute.

The Christmas Bird Count#

The oldest of them, run by Audubon since 1900, and structurally different from the rest. Each count takes place on a single day between December 14 and January 5, inside a fixed circle 15 miles (24 km) across, organized by a local compiler who assigns teams to areas. It is free to take part.

The feeder-watcher route into the CBC is the part people miss. If your home falls inside an active count circle, you can usually contribute as a feeder watcher, counting the birds in your own yard on count day and reporting to the compiler, without walking a mile in the cold. Contact the compiler in advance; they will tell you the protocol and the hours. More than a century of continuous CBC data is one of the longest-running wildlife datasets anywhere, and it is heavily used in work on winter distributions.

Short-protocol and local programs#

Beyond the big five there is a tier of smaller programs designed for people with little time or no binoculars. The Cornell Lab's Celebrate Urban Birds is the best-known example of the style: a very short species list, a ten-minute count, and a deliberate focus on city neighborhoods that the larger projects under-sample. Programs in this tier change more often than the flagships, so check what is currently running rather than assuming.

• Local Audubon chapter surveys, which often want exactly the neighborhoods that nobody covers.
• State and provincial breeding bird atlas projects, which run in multi-year blocks and welcome yard records.
• Migration timing projects, where a first-arrival date for a hummingbird or an oriole is the whole contribution.
• Nest box trail monitoring organized by a local land trust or park, which is NestWatch with company.

Which one fits you#

Your first count, step by step#

The FeederWatch protocol is the most structured of the feeder-based counts, so it is worth walking through properly. Everything here transfers to the GBBC and to eBird with minor changes.

1. Choose your count site and describe it once: the feeders you run, roughly how much habitat surrounds them, and what you offer. This is set up at the start of the season and left alone.
2. Pick two consecutive days. FeederWatch asks for at least five non-count days between one two-day count and the next, so a weekly rhythm works well.
3. Watch when you can on those two days. There is no minimum. Twenty minutes over breakfast on both days is a legitimate count.
4. Keep one running tally across both days on a single sheet, not two separate day counts.
5. For each species, record the largest number of individuals you could see at the same moment during the whole two-day period.
6. Note anything you cannot identify rather than guessing, and leave it off the count.
7. Record weather and effort as the form asks, then submit online or through the app.
8. Report sick birds if you see them, and follow the sick bird steps in your own yard.

Two practical notes. Binoculars help enormously for the sparrows and finches, and 8x42 is the standard recommendation for reasons set out in choosing binoculars. And a count is far easier if you can already separate the confusing groups, so finch identification and sparrow identification are worth reading before November rather than during it.

The maximum-at-once rule, and why it exists#

This is the rule everyone gets wrong on their first count. You do not add up the birds you saw. You record the highest number of that species you could see simultaneously.

If a black-capped chickadee visits your feeder forty times in a morning, and you never see more than three at once, your count is three. If you saw two at 8am and four at 3pm, your count is four, not six. Across a two-day count you keep one tally and raise it only when you beat your previous maximum.

That last point is the whole logic. The projects are not trying to know exactly how many chickadees exist in your yard. They are trying to compare your yard with a hundred thousand others, and across three decades, which requires that everybody make the same kind of error in the same direction. A rule that is a little conservative but applied identically by everyone is far more useful than a rule that is accurate in principle and applied differently by each observer.

Once you are counting this way, the rest follows naturally. You will start noticing the irruption years when common redpolls or evening grosbeaks turn up where they usually do not, you will have a real record of when your first junco arrives, and the feeding calendar will stop being general advice and start being a description of your own yard.