(Thanks Maryann for reminding me about this this year!)

Looking for a fun activity with the kids this weekend? Check out Cornell University and the Audubon Society’s annual “Great Backyard Bird Count”.

This is a really easy way to help the birding world keep tabs on the migration/habitat patterns of North American birds, and unlike other bird counts, you don’t really need pre-registration or anything like that. You can observe for as little as a 15 minute increment for your counts to be integrated. Do it between now and midnight on the 18th to get your observations counted.

So all you have to do is go to the GBBC link and select the yellow “GO” link to input your findings. Even if you do all the observing ahead of time, you can put in the findings after the experiment is over and it will get into the results within 2 hours. My reports are already there!

And if you’re a statistics weenie like me, make sure you check out the results link at the top of the web page and see what kinds of cool data has been collected so far!

So I’m spending the next 2-3 days, Peterson’s Field Guide in hand, in the kitchen and backporch quietly observing. I’m trying to get Jake to help, and he seems very interested, but he can’t keep still and quiet enough. He gets all excited when he sees a bird and starts to dance around.