Northern cardinals showed up on the most lists

My friend (and fellow Gazette columnist) Scott Shalaway, who also happens to be a respected authority on birds and birding, gave a summary of the 2010 Great Backyard Bird Count in his most recent column:

The 2010 Great Backyard Bird Count is history, and the results are impressive. Over Presidents Day weekend in mid-February, North American birders submitted a total of 96,842 checklists that tallied 11,185,368 individual birds representing 600 species.

This data gives ornithologists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology a snapshot of midwinter bird populations that can be compared to earlier counts dating back to 1998. It also gives anyone with just a bit of curiosity access to the same data. (What a great source of information for junior and high school students looking for a science fair project.) This year’s most frequently reported species was the northern cardinal, which was found on 53,262 checklists.

The species with the highest count was the American robin (1,849,444), followed by Canada goose (746,724), Snow goose (534,708), American crow (526,376), European starling (513,334), American goldfinch (427,103), common grackle (373,129), dark-eyed junco (372,702), mourning dove (288,868), and red-winged blackbird (286,115).

New York birders led the count with the most checklists submitted at 5,693. California birders ranked second with 5,315 checklists, followed by North Carolina 5,030, Pennsylvania 4,861, and Ohio 4,244.

The highest species counts came from warm weather and/or coastal areas. Texas reported a total of 343 species, followed by California 318, Florida 277, Arizona 231, and Washington 203.

Counters in temperate latitudes reported far fewer species. New York, for example, tallied 157 species; Ohio reported 144 species, Pennsylvania 132, Michigan 117, and West Virginia 95.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8, 2010 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Nature, Wildlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.