2009 Backyard Bird Count

Kids help with wild bird inventory

Missouri kids and their families helped last month to conduct the nation's largest inventory of wild birds. They also got a chance to learn how to make their backyards more attractive to birds.

The Missouri Botanical Garden held a Backyard Bird Festival on Saturday, Feb. 7, where kids and their families could learn all about wild birds.

One of the topics was the Great Backyard Bird Count. That's a national effort to inventory bird species in the northern hemisphere. During the weekend of Feb. 13-16, adults and kids across the country did informal counts of birds in their areas.

The 15-minute bird counts can be as simple as families checking their own backyards. Or they might join with others to do a count in a nearby state or local park.

They then report their number and species of birds to a national website run by Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology and the Audubon Society.

(You can monitor progress of the 2009 count and review past counts by going to http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/. There's a kids layer at http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/kids.)

In the 2008 bird count, 85,000 checklists were submitted nationally. The lists identified 635 different species among the 9.8 million birds counted.

In Missouri, the 2008 count included 1,344 checklists with 129 species among the over 400,000 birds counted. St. Louis residents submitted 143 checklists with 63 different species.

St. Louis had the largest number of 2008 checklists reported in the state. Other area cities reporting last year included St. Charles, with 43; Ballwin, with 19; Chesterfield, with 13, and Troy, with 12.

Ms. Laura Schaefer of Millstadt, Ill. led the bird count classes at the Botanical Garden. She's a biology and botany instructor at Southwest Illinois College in Belleville, Ill.

She said she was among the bird-watchers who were a part of the first national Great Backyard Bird Count. This year's count was the 14th annual effort.

"The bird count is great for kids and beginners are always welcome," she said.

She said the Cornell bird count is an indication of how ordinary citizens can contribute to scientific research. "No one could do an inventory this large without the help of volunteers from across the country," she said.

At the Botanical Garden's Backyard Bird Festival, kids and their families had a variety of bird classes. Among them was instruction on how to make your own backyards more bird-friendly.

There were also some outdoor bird-watching hikes through the Garden's grounds. The walkers brought along binoculars to do a little informal searching for birds and to practice identifying them.

Ms. Schaefer said previous bird counts had noted year-to-year fluctuations in the number and species of birds. For instance, the American crow had been one of the birds most often spotted in previous years.

"But, it was the 10th most-viewed bird in the 2008 count. That decline showed the effect of the West Nile virus on the crow population," she said. But, she added the 2008 count total seemed to have stabilized, indicating the trend of crows infected by the virus may have leveled off.

At the Garden's bird festival, kids and their families got instruction in basic and intermediate bird identification.

There was even one advanced class in identification of "birds of the night." This class was mostly about owls, including information about behavior, migration, habitats and prey on which they feed.

There also was instruction in hobbies associated with bird-watching. They included gardens for birds, bird photography and "Backyard Bird Feeding 101."

The class was about adapting your backyard to encourage more visits by more varieties of birds. Included were tips on how to provide the three essentials for birds: food, shelter and water.

Different species of birds have very different feeding habits and like different foods. Birds eat such things as leaves, grasses, seeds, nectar, fruits, nuts, worms and bugs.

They also favor different types of natural shelter, from tall trees to ground-hugging grasses.

One constant need is water. They drink from a variety of water sources.

Kids and their families were given instruction on how to provide the three essentials.

For instances, humans can provide foods ranging from sunflower seeds, cracked corn, suet, sugar water, fruits and nuts. They also can plant their gardens with seed-bearing flowers, berry bushes, nectar-producing flowers and nut-bearing trees.

The kids got a chance to see how to build a variety of bird feeders. They include platform and hanging feeders as well as liquid and suet feeders. They also got instructions on how to protect the food from raids by squirrels and other animals.