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This story comes to you through a partnership between Audubon and BirdNote®, a show that airs daily on public radio stations nationwide.
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Many of the bird sounds you hear on BirdNote – including this Pine Siskin – come from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Cornell adds more to our understanding of the avian world. Project FeederWatch, sponsored by Cornell and National Audubon, is a window on the birds of winter. Through Project FeederWatch, scientists are able to track the movements of birds and learn whether their numbers are increasing or decreasing. FeederWatch has collected and organized data, by state, since 1988.
You can be part of this citizen-science movement by counting birds at your own feeder. FeederWatch runs from mid-November to early April, and you can start any time during the watch season. Register on-line or via US mail. There's a small fee to participate, which helps pay for materials.
So what have we learned? Well, in the northern states, from the East Coast to the West, the Dark-eyed Junco is one of the most common feeder birds. In the South and Southeast, the beautiful Northern Cardinal usually tops the list. Help science with your observations.
The bird calls you hear on BirdNote come from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. To hear this show again, visit the website, BirdNote.org.
Call of the Pine Siskin provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by D.S. Herr and G.A. Keller. Dark-eyed Junco call recorded by W.L. Hershberger. Northern Cardinal song recorded by G.A. Keller.
Writer: Ellen Blackstone
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2014 Tune In to Nature.org November 2014 Narrator: Michael Stein