Baltimore Oriole by Katherine Smith

An important part of the celebration is to have citizen scientists help scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology collect information about sixteen key species of urban birds. The scientists have created a project that will use data collected from participants in the celebration to study these resident and migratory birds - their numbers, their behavior, their interaction with the urban habitat.

Why only 16 species of birds?

To include anyone who wants to participate, we have kept the number of birds to observe limited. Those who have never birded before can easily learn to identify these birds that they probably see every day, and some that visit green spaces in cities only in Spring and Summer.

The challenge was to design a simple project that everyone can do that would also answer questions about the relative use of small versus large patches of habitat for birds and to examine edge effects. By picking a handful of species that people can easily recognize, we can ensure that the quality of the data will be robust and also achieve participant levels sufficient to investigate the effects of habitat patch size and location at multiple scales.