In 2022, eBird received more than 11.4 million complete checklists from your birding efforts. Whether you’re seeing common birds or endangered species, eBird thrives on the enthusiasm and engagement of hundreds of thousands of dedicated participants worldwide who make eBird part of their regular birding activities.
In 2023, we challenge you to bird more: submit an average of one checklist a day for the entire year. At the end of the year, three winners will be chosen from among those who submitted at least 365 eligible checklists in 2023. Each winner will receive a pair of Zeiss Terra ED 8 x 42 binoculars! We are thrilled that Carl Zeiss Sports Optics will be a sponsor for this year-long competition.
This challenge may be, well, challenging, but with eBird Mobile in your hand, submitting checklists from anywhere is easier than ever. Don’t have a smartphone? That’s OK. Trusty notebooks still work and can be transcribed once you get home.
Birding and eBirding don’t have to be day-long endeavors. Many eBirders submit checklists from short counts in their garden, over lunchtime walks, or at a quick stop to scan their favorite patch. eBird welcomes short counts from anywhere, so even a parking lot count or quick survey from your doorstep will help you qualify (and contribute valuable data).
Below are a few ideas for how to meet the challenge and have fun doing it.
Count birds at home
Bird observations from home can be some of the most valuable eBird checklists you create, because the only person to count those birds may be YOU! Consider doing one checklist each morning (or afternoon) in your yard or garden, balcony, or front step. Or make a daily checklist part of your morning routine—these could be “sipping my coffee” counts or “walking the dog” counts. These counts will become more rewarding as you watch your home birding list grow over the course of the year. How many species can you find at home in 2023?
A fun way to explore your home birding is with bar charts: just find and select your home location from My Locations, then tap “Bar Charts (personal)”. If you have multiple locations at your residence, add them to an ‘official’ eBird Yard to create a single bar chart for all your home birding data.
If you submit a checklist a day, after 365 days the bar chart will show the comings and goings of birds throughout the year. The more checklists you submit, the more informative the bar charts become.
Merlin Bird ID project coordinator Drew Weber has one of the Top 100 eBird Yards in New York state. But he needs a checklist from the middle of June to fill that gap in his bar charts!
Change the bar chart date range to include even more past sightings. What a wonderful way to walk down memory lane!
Take Birding Breaks
Whether you take a lunch break, tea break, or a “stretch your legs” break— turn it into a dedicated Birding Break! Birding Breaks could be a quick survey of nearby park or checking for waterfowl on a local lake. Even a short, 5-10 minute count of birds outside your office can benefit you and the birds we all care about. Find your breaktime patch and commit to it during your workdays to help meet the challenge and build great datasets.
Impromptu counts
Are you usually “out and about” during the day? Shake things up and pick a different eBird spot every day! Maybe there are a few places—parks, ponds, open areas, or forests—that you can cycle through in your weekly routine. Stop wherever you please for your quick daily count: eBird welcomes the variety and it may help keep it fun for you. Check out this note from an eBirder about their commitment (since 1 Jan 2007!) to submit a checklist a day and the kinds of habitats they sometimes end up covering.
Birding after dark
If the sun has set and you still haven’t submitted your daily list, it’s not too late! Consider submitting a nocturnal bird count. Nocturnal counts are valuable too, as they help us understand where and when eBirders are finding owls, nightjars, and other species active at night. Or you may find no birds at all! That’s OK—lists with zero species are still welcomed in eBird. We recommend that you add some checklist notes indicating that you tried for birds and found none.
Every bird counts!
Your consecutive eBirding streak is prominently displayed on the home page. If you want the ultimate challenge (not required for this contest) see if you can really maintain a checklist-a-day for an entire year— or even longer! Your daily efforts may not always tally a lot of birds, but remember that as long as you are searching your hardest, complete checklists from busy streets, bad weather days, or at night all qualify.
While long lists and rare species are often the targets for a day of birding, the scientific value of an eBird list is not measured by the quantity or quality of the bird list. In fact, it is often the short counts from undersampled areas that are most valuable. One of the main scientific challenges with understanding eBird data is that effort tends to be concentrated around birding hotspots, rare birds, and certain types of habitats. If eBirders commit to following our best practices and participate in the “Checklist-a-day” challenge, we’ll help fill in the eBird maps for the blank spaces between eBird hotspots.
Carl Zeiss Sports Optics is a proven leader in sports optics and is the official optics sponsor for eBird. “We are thrilled to continue our partnership with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and support the vital scientific data being collected by dedicated eBirders.” – Richard Moncrief, Birding and Nature Observation Segment Manager at Carl Zeiss SBE