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.