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2020 Birmingham Spring Bird Count & Bird-a-thon
April 25, 2020 All day
To make a pledge to support our Bird-a-thon, click on the blue button below to fill out the pledge form:
Seasonal bird counts have been a central part of Alabama Audubon’s work ever since its founding in 1946. This year, we’re continuing that tradition with four great counts, culminating in our fifty-sixth annual Spring Bird Count and Bird-a-thon, scheduled for Saturday, April 25th. With social distancing and shelter-in-place rules currently enacted to flatten the curve with COVID-19, this year we are not allowing field participants. You may participate at your home feeder or in your backyard (click here for instructions).
It’s our spring count with a competitive twist! This year, we invite our members and the public to pledge a donation for the number of species seen that day. We encourage a pledge of $1 per species for what you see in your yard. So if you saw 25–30 birds that day, that would be around $25-$30, for example. Your pledges support our conservation efforts throughout Alabama.
Spring migrants, resident hawks, large waders, even common birds like Northern mockingbirds and American robins, are all fair game—each sighting contributes to a half-century-long dataset with important information on shifting ranges, the effects of urbanization, and climate-related population changes.
Make a pledge: To make a pledge to support our Spring Bird-a-thon, click the link at the top of the page that says “PLEDGE HERE.” We’ll email you by late April with the number of species from the count, the amount due, and how to make the payment. Please submit your payment by April 30th.
Compilation location: With the current shelter-in-place and social distancing restrictions to flatten the curve with COVID-19, we will not have a compilation. Instead, we are asking participants to please upload your data into eBird and share your list with us (ALAudubon) to contribute to our community science data!
If you have questions about how to use eBird, please email our Science & Conservation Director here. You can also take our upcoming, free online course from Anne Miller on April 16th, “Audubon at Home: Sharing Your Sightings with eBird,” to learn more.
More information: To learn more about how bird counts work, and to read the history of the one that started it all, check out National Audubon’s “History of the Christmas Bird Count” page.
