New Project FeederWatch Season Begins

Nature Notes for October 31, 2014

For two days in the week of November 8, you will find me, for part of the day, sitting in the rocking chair near my back door, counting the birds visiting my feeder. November 8 marks the beginning of another Project FeederWatch season.

Project FeederWatch is a winter-long survey of birds that visit feeders at backyards, nature centers, community areas, and other locales in North America. FeederWatchers periodically count the birds they see at their feeders from November through early April and send their counts to Project FeederWatch. FeederWatch data help scientists track broad scale movements of winter bird populations and long-term trends in bird distribution and abundance.

Project FeederWatch was started as an Ontario based feeder survey, begun in 1976 by Dr. Erica Dunn of Long Point Bird Observatory. By 2014, it had grown into an international research project, co-sponsored by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada.

In the 2013-14 season, 128,586 checklists were submitted from 9,940 unique locations. Counts were submitted from every province and territory in Canada and every state in the U.S., including two from Hawaii.

The 2013-14 year-end summary included an article about the effects of the severe winter weather in Canada. Average numbers of individual birds at feeders in Canada, as well as average numbers of species at each station were lower than the usual. Perceptions of feederwatchers were supported by the data collected.

The year-end summary lists the top 25 species of birds seen at feeders by region. For this region, the top of the list, that is the species seen at the greatest number of feeders, was chickadee. Because this region extends south into the range of the Carolina Chickadee, “chickadee” in the summary includes both Black-capped and Carolina Chickadees. 

 

Photo © Rob Lonsberry Photography

 Dark-eyed Junco, second in the "Top 25" list from 2013/14 Project FeederWatch in eastern North America.

Second on the list was Dark-eyed Junco. Third was Mourning Dove. Last winter’s harsh weather was very hard on Mourning Doves. FeederWatch data showed slight declines in the percentage of sites visited by Mourning Doves and also in the average group size across the country. One study of wintering Mourning Doves in Ontario found that the majority of birds spending the winter in Ontario had lost one or more toes to frostbite.

Project FeederWatch makes use of the information that can be collected from the popular activity of maintaining backyard bird feeders. The counts of numbers of birds and species of birds are collected in a systematic way, using a specified protocol.

I have been participating ever since the winter of 1996-97, the first complete winter I spent at my house in Port Hope. When I started, all data were reported on paper forms and mailed in at the end of the season. Now, the data can be directly input on-line, which makes the job much easier.

Anyone with an interest in birds and a feeder can sign up to participate in this project. Those interested can get more information at www.birdscanada.org/pfw.tml. There is a fee to participate. The fees support the project – printed materials, web site, data analysis, publication of a year-end report (which is sent to all participants). FeederWatch also produces instructional material in both print form and on-line to assist participants with tricky identification.