Lee County joins national annual avian audit beginning today The News-Press
14.12.09
1:10 A.M. — For a lot of people, the words “Christmas” and “bird” conjure up images of a turkey dinner — and maybe seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree.
But for serious birders, “Christmas” and “bird” mean the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, often called the “oldest and largest wildlife survey in the world” — this year’s count is the 110th.
Every year over the course of three weeks around Christmas — today through Jan. 2 this time — thousands of people spread out across the United States and many nations to count birds.
Their data are entered into Audubon’s annual bird count summary.
“A really cool thing that comes out of the bird count is that Audubon maintains a Web site with all the data,” said Brad Smith, a Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation researcher. “You can go to the Web site and do research for every year’s data. You can look at individual species, do your own graphs and trend lines. It’s a nifty Web site.”
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