Birding for a Cause: Breeding Bird Atlases Need Your Help this Summer

If you’re ready to hit the road this summer, consider putting your birding skills to work for a great cause. Breeding bird atlases are heavily reliant on volunteer effort, and there are several occurring in North America right now that need your help!

New Challenge for Birders

Atlasing adds a new element to birding beyond the usual “see, identify, list” practice. Atlasing is about trying to figure out why a species is there at all: Is that bird passing through, checking out a nesting site, or carrying a caterpillar to a nest full of hungry young? It’s the extra steps of studying and observing behaviors often missed with more fast-paced birding that are really rewarding for many atlasers.

Aside from providing you with awesome birding experiences, atlases serve the important purpose of tracking bird populations on a scale no other project can accomplish. During the course of an atlas, out-of-the-way locales and underbirded counties get better coverage, leading to a more complete picture of birdlife than can be provided with otherwise fragmented coverage of hotspots and populated regions.

Typically repeated at 20-year intervals, many states and provinces in North America have already conducted “first generation” breeding bird atlases. These serve as a baseline to compare against second and even third generation atlases to document range shifts, population increases, and population decreases. Understanding which species and populations may be declining helps managers prioritize conservation actions, which means your birding can have a huge impact!

Join the American Birding Association at www.aba.org!