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EBird
The everyday workhorse of bird research. You go birding anywhere, for as long as you like, and submit a checklist of what you saw and heard; a ten-minute lap of the local park counts as much as a day at a refuge, as long as you note when, where and how long you looked.
Those checklists add up. A 2025 study in Science drew on 36 million eBird observations to map population change for 495 North American species and found that birds are declining most steeply where they are most abundant. Once you have an account, the big seasonal bird counts that run through eBird take no extra setup.
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INaturalist
The one to pick if you notice beetles, frogs and spiders as much as birds. Photograph any wild animal, upload it with a location, and a community of naturalists helps confirm the species; agreed records become research-grade data that scientists can download. A single photo on a walk is a complete contribution.
Ordinary uploads matter. The Angled Australian Barkhopper, a tiny pygmy grasshopper, had not been recorded for more than 130 years until amateur photographers in northern New South Wales posted pictures of it, and use of iNaturalist data in peer-reviewed research has risen roughly tenfold in five years.
More about INaturalist3
Great Backyard Bird Count
The easiest possible start. Over a four-day weekend each February, you watch birds for as little as 15 minutes, anywhere in the world, and enter what you counted through eBird or the Merlin app. Kitchen windows are fine. The next count runs February 12 to 15, 2027.
The scale is the point: an estimated 1,146,284 people took part in 2026, reporting 8,257 species on 467,696 checklists. Because every count lands in eBird, a February morning with your coffee feeds the same database that more than 150 research papers drew on in 2024 alone.
More about Great Backyard Bird Count4
Project FeederWatch
Made for anyone with a bird feeder and a window. The season runs from November to April, and you count the birds at your feeder for as much or as little time as you like, weekly or just once all winter. Run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Birds Canada, it costs $18 a year for US residents, while Canadians take part by donating any amount to Birds Canada.
Winter data like this is hard to get any other way. In Florida, FeederWatch counts showed the winter population of the Painted Bunting declining steadily since the 1980s, which prompted a state monitoring program.
More about Project FeederWatch5
Christmas Bird Count
The world's longest-running bird count, going since 1900, and a sociable one. Each count happens on a single day between December 14 and January 5, inside a circle 15 miles across; a local leader called the compiler picks the day and organizes the volunteers, first-timers are often paired with experienced counters, and you can also count at a backyard feeder inside the circle.
More than a century of the same method makes for powerful comparisons. Christmas Bird Count data has revealed dramatic declines in grassland birds, documented species shifting their ranges as the climate warms, and fed more than 300 peer-reviewed papers. Sign up with your nearest circle's compiler early, because participation has to be arranged in advance.
More about Christmas Bird Count6
Bumble Bee Watch
Bees are hard to identify, which is exactly why this project suits beginners: you photograph a bumble bee, upload it with a location, take a guess at the species, and an expert checks your answer. A backyard flower bed on a summer lunch break is enough, and you learn the species as the verifications come back.
The records have real weight. A 2024 study in PLOS ONE found that Bumble Bee Watch supplied more than 25 percent of North American bumble bee records in the decade it focused on, and volunteers have turned up at-risk species such as the rusty patched bumble bee in unexpected places.
More about Bumble Bee Watch7
Journey North
The best fit if you want to watch a migration happen in real time. Whenever you spot a monarch, a hummingbird or another migrant, you log the sighting, and it appears on live maps tracking the wave as it moves across the continent. One report on the first monarch of spring takes a minute.
Those small reports add up to practical advice. A 2025 study in the Journal of Insect Conservation pooled more than a hundred thousand records of monarch eggs, caterpillars and chrysalises, Journey North's among them, and found breeding starts about a month later in the northeast of the range than in the northwest, timing meant to guide when roadsides get mowed.
More about Journey North8
Big Garden Birdwatch
For readers in the UK, this is the one everyone does. On a weekend in late January you spend an hour counting the birds that land in your yard, local park or even on a balcony, then send in the highest number of each species you saw at once.
Running since 1979, it has turned a nation's window-watching into a long record of how common birds are faring. More than 650,000 people took part in 2026, and the House Sparrow topped the count for the 23rd year running, even though its breeding numbers have fallen sharply over the past 50 years.
More about Big Garden Birdwatch9
Big Butterfly Count
The UK's summer counterpart to a winter bird count, and possibly the most relaxing fieldwork there is. Between mid-July and early August you sit somewhere sunny for 15 minutes and record the butterflies and day-flying moths you see, using a free identification chart. You can do as many counts as you like.
It works as an early-warning system. The 2024 count was the lowest in its history, a result that alarmed conservationists, while 2025, with more than 125,000 people taking part, gave the Large White and Small White their best results on record.
More about Big Butterfly Count10
Happywhale
Turns a whale-watching trip into research. Upload your photos of a humpback's tail and software matches the black-and-white pattern on the underside to a known individual, checked by a scientist; you then get to follow that whale's sightings over the years. The only time cost is the upload once you are home.
The combined photos changed what scientists knew about the North Pacific. A 2024 study in Royal Society Open Science, built on images from thousands of contributors, found humpback numbers there fell by about 7,000, roughly 20 percent, between 2012 and 2021, as a massive marine heatwave cut their food supply.
More about Happywhale11
Zooniverse
Camera-trap projects such as Snapshot Serengeti
The pick for rainy days or anyone without a backyard. On Zooniverse you look at photos from motion-triggered wildlife cameras in your browser and tag which animals appear, a few clicks per image, for five minutes or an hour.
Snapshot Serengeti proved the idea: volunteers sorted 1.2 million image sets from 225 cameras in Tanzania, and their pooled answers matched experts on species 96.6 percent of the time. That project has run out of new images for now, but live camera-trap projects such as the European Camera Trap Project and Wild Mont-Blanc work the same way.
More about Zooniverse
