Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) 2023

February 25, 2023

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In news

India was among 190 countries that participated in GBBC 2023 from February 17-20.

About

It is an annual event that brings bird enthusiasts, students and nature enthusiasts together for counting birds they see around the places where they live, work or study.

Major Findings

West Bengal reported the highest number of species (489 species) followed by Uttarakhand (426), Arunachal Pradesh (407), Assam (397) and Karnataka (371) during the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) 2023. Tamil Nadu and Kerala took the eighth and ninth spots with 349 and 325 species.
India’s birds are thriving in diverse habitats from the city to the countryside. A remarkable increase in participation across the country helped India upload the second-highest number of checklists after the United States of America and the third-highest species of any country.

About GBBC

The GBBC was launched in 1998 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, and was the first online citizen-science project (also referred to as community science) to collect data on wild birds and to display results in near real time. Bird Count India organises the GBBC in the country.
In 2013, it became a global project after entering data into eBird, the world’s largest biodiversity-related citizen science (community science) project.

Bird Count India

Bird Count India is an informal partnership of organisations and groups working together to increase collective knowledge about bird distributions and populations.
It supports listing and monitoring of birds in India: from individuals maintaining their bird lists, to groups of students or birders monitoring local birds, to large India-wide projects to document the abundance and distribution of species.