LIMA — If you can count, you can help take a census of birds in the area.
The Great Backyard Bird Count began Friday and continues through Monday all across North America.
In Allen County, the Johnny Appleseed Metropolitan Park District held an opportunity to count the birds in their backyard, specifically the backyard of the McElroy Environmental Center. Several bird feeders were filled as people awaited the arrival of the birds. People could see anything from cardinals to downy woodpeckers at the feeders.
“You don’t have to be a scientist. You can be just anybody and what we’re doing is trying to get a snapshot over the weekend of birds, where they are, in what numbers, what kind of things are happening in population, diseases and other things so birders across the country are getting outside or even more comfortably they’re sitting inside their own house with a cup of coffee and they’re watching birds over this weekend,” said naturalist Dan Hodges.
This is a program run through Cornell University.
“This is a great way to get an estimate on the bird population and birds serve as a great environmental indicator. Like the canary in the coal mine — where the coal miners would go down and if the gases got too high the bird would die before the people would die and so if your bird stops singing you knew you needed to get out of the mine — that’s kind of what we’re looking at across the country. We’re trying to use these birds as an environmental indicator. Certain populations of birds, certain species of birds, their presence or absence means something for us. So that could be wetland habitats or the quality of our forests or the species of invasive birds or warm weather birds moving further north or diseases spreading through the population, so scientists use this data that we’re collecting as citizen scientists and they’re trying to extrapolate what that means for humans,” Hodges said.
Throughout the count, information is submitted online through the Great Backyard Bird Count website.
“We’re seeing great comebacks from some of these birds. The eagle is an excellent indicator of something that humans have done negatively, as the birds started to decline due to the use of pesticides and then we banned those pesticides and those eagles came back,” he said.
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