How to Participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count (and What FeederWatch Asks Instead)

How to participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count takes about one sentence: watch birds for at least fifteen minutes on one of four days in February and submit what you saw. Project FeederWatch, which this site quotes on nearly every other page, asks for something quite different, and the difference is worth understanding before you pick one.

Both turn an ordinary window into a data point. Neither requires you to be good at this.

What is the Great Backyard Bird Count?

A four-day event in February with a very low floor.

Audubon, which runs it jointly with two other organizations, describes it as a free, fun, and easy event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of bird populations.

The commitment is genuinely small: Participants are asked to count birds for as little as 15 minutes (or as long as they wish) on one or more days of the four-day event and report their sightings online at birdcount.org.

There is no qualification to clear, and no requirement to be at home: Anyone can take part in the Great Backyard Bird Count, from beginning bird watchers to experts, and you can participate from your backyard, or anywhere in the world.

The scale is what makes fifteen minutes worth submitting. Audubon: Recently, more than 450,000 participants submitted their bird observations online, creating the largest instantaneous snapshot of global bird populations ever recorded.

On dates. Audubon's page states that The 30th annual GBBC will be held February 12-15, 2027. That is a moving target by definition, so treat the linked page as the authority rather than this one, and check it in January.

What is Project FeederWatch, and how is it different?

A season rather than a weekend, with a method attached.

The window is long: Project FeederWatch runs from November 1 through April 30. Within it, the unit of observation is a pair of days rather than a session: For each count, select two consecutive days as often as once a week, and the project asks for spacing between them, recommending that you leave at least five days when you do not count between each of your two-day counts.

The frequency floor is lower than people assume: Counting less often is fine. Even if you only count once all season, your data are valuable.

FeederWatch charges a participation fee and the Great Backyard Bird Count does not. The reason FeederWatch gives is structural: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Birds Canada are non-profit organizations supported primarily by participant and membership fees. This article deliberately does not print the amount. The page explaining the fee does not state one, fees change between seasons, and a number copied here would go stale without anyone noticing. The signup page carries the current figure.

The counting rule most people get wrong

One rule separates a useful submission from a wrong one, and it is not intuitive.

You are not recording how many birds visited over two days. You are recording the largest group you saw at any one moment: For every species you can identify, record the maximum number of individuals visible simultaneously during your two-day count. The reason is stated plainly: Keep one running tally across both days. This way you won't count the same bird twice.

Six chickadees at the feeder in the morning and six in the afternoon is a count of six, not twelve, unless you saw all twelve at once. Without that rule, a busy feeder would inflate every dataset it fed into.

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The phrase doing the work in that rule is every species you can identify, and the count is only as good as that step. A printed guide still earns its place next to the app for a bird that will not hold still, and the Sibley guide is a single-volume illustrated guide to North American birds.

There is a matching rule about which birds belong in the count at all: Count all birds you see in your count site during the day that are attracted to resources that you provide, even if they don't visit feeders, but ignore birds that simply fly over your count site. A hawk passing overhead is not your count. A hawk that came for the birds at your feeder is a different matter.

Do I need a feeder to participate?

No, and FeederWatch says so directly: Even if you don't provide feeders, you can still count birds for FeederWatch.

The site is defined by what you can watch rather than by what you have bought: choose a portion of your yard that is easy to monitor, preferably an area that is visible from one vantage point.

Three optional fields will look familiar if you have read much of this site. FeederWatch lets participants submit, alongside the bird counts, mammals seen in the count site, sick birds and bird mortality, and behavioral interactions and predation events. Those are three subjects with their own articles here: what turns up at a feeder besides birds, what to do about a sick or dead bird, and the dominance order that decides who gets the perch. The last of those is built on published analyses of exactly this data, which means the interactions you record are the raw material for the next version of it.

Which one should you do?

The honest sequence for most people is GBBC first. It costs nothing, it runs on a weekend, and it tells you whether counting birds is something you actually enjoy before you commit to a season of it.

Why the boring counts are the ones that matter

Anyone who has ever decided their yard was too dull to report has the reasoning backwards.

FeederWatch names the exact failure: FeederWatch participants often stop counting their birds because they believe that their counts are not important. And then it explains why that instinct damages the dataset: Focusing on the extreme cases would provide a biased view of bird populations, and ignoring the common birds could be a major mistake.

The conclusion is the one that should get somebody over the hump: it's the everyday observations of common birds that are so important for monitoring bird populations.

Four house sparrows and a starling is data. A week with nothing at all is data. The submissions that feel too ordinary to bother with are the ones the population trends are actually made of, and the yards that only get reported when something rare shows up are the ones that quietly skew the picture.

Questions people ask

How do I participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count? Count birds for at least fifteen minutes on one or more of the four February days and submit your sightings at birdcount.org. There is no signup fee and no experience requirement.

Is the Great Backyard Bird Count free? Yes. Audubon describes it as a free event open to bird watchers of all ages.

What is Project FeederWatch? A survey running November 1 through April 30 in which participants count birds at a chosen site on pairs of consecutive days and submit the results. It charges a participation fee.

How do I join Project FeederWatch? Sign up through the project, choose a count site you can watch from one vantage point, and pick your two-day counts. Print materials take a few weeks to arrive, but counting can start immediately.

Do I need a bird feeder to take part? No. FeederWatch states that you can count for the project without providing feeders at all.

How do I count birds without counting the same one twice? Record the maximum number of each species visible at the same moment, kept as one running tally across both days, rather than adding up every visit.

My yard only gets common birds. Is it worth submitting? Yes, and FeederWatch argues it is the point. Reporting only unusual sightings would bias the picture of bird populations.

How to participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count: the short version

Fifteen minutes, four days in February, free, and no test to pass. That is the whole entry requirement, and it exists because a snapshot assembled from hundreds of thousands of ordinary yards is worth more than a careful survey of a few dozen good ones.

FeederWatch is the longer version of the same bargain: a fee, a season, and one rule to learn about counting the largest group you see at once rather than every bird that passes through. This site has quoted its results on cleaning schedules, seed preferences, squirrel distances, and who wins a fight at the feeder. All of that came from people watching an ordinary window and writing down what was there, including the mornings when it was four house sparrows and nothing else.

This article contains one Amazon affiliate link, to a field guide, and no fee amount. The Great Backyard Bird Count details are attributed to Audubon, which runs it with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Birds Canada; the FeederWatch details come from the project's own participation page. Both event dates and fees change between seasons, so the linked pages are the authority rather than this one.