The 10th Indian edition of the global Great Backyard Bird Count starts on Friday! The #GBBC is a 4-day event (18-21 Feb) to celebrate our birds by documenting them across the country. Just look for birds as often as you can, and upload your lists to eBird. birdcount.in/event/gbbc/
Last year (2021), 2954 birders in India uploaded 31,355 lists during the GBBC, clocking nearly 17,000 hours of birding & recording 965 species – 72 % of the total number of species known to occur in the country! birdcount.in/gbbc2021result…
Can we cross 1,000 species this year?
Great Backyard Bird Count and Campus Bird Count in #Meghalaya
Some 160 campuses from across India are participating in the #CampusBirdCount. And more than 80 additional bird-related #GBBC events are happening over the next four days (18-21 Feb), many of which are open to the public.
1. Conservation is not only about saving threatened species; it is also about keeping common birds common! But how do we do this without knowing how common species are faring?
Two years ago on this day (17 Feb), the State of India's Birds (SoIB) reported on precisely this.
2. Using millions of reports contributed by Indian birdwatchers to the eBird platform, SoIB 2020 examined trends in reporting rates (an index of abundance) over 25+ years. This is the only assessment of the majority (867 species) of India's birds. The results were eye-opening!
3. Some species are doing well. For example, our National Bird, the Indian Peafowl, is clearly increasing in abundance and spreading into new places.