If you have a quarter of an hour to spare between Saturday and Monday, you can do your bit for “citizen science.” Simply ensconce yourself in a bird-observing spot for at least 15 minutes — your living room, park bench, church ground, school yard — and identify and count all the birds you see during that time.
It’s all part of the annual Great Backyard Bird Count run by the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This year’s count began Friday but will continue through Monday, so you have three days remaining to participate.
You can count for longer than 15 minutes if you wish, and you can count birds in as many places and on as many days as you like. Submit a separate checklist for each new day, for each new location, or for the same location if you counted at a different time of day. Estimate the number of individual birds of each species you saw during your count period.
To register and submit your results, go to http://gbbc.birdcount.org. You’ll be among the thousands of Georgians who count birds each year for science.
In other news from the bird world:
— February is bluebird month because it’s when pairs of the colorful songbirds start checking out bluebird boxes and other possible nesting sites. By February’s end, some bluebirds already will be tending eggs.
— There seems to be an increasing number of Baltimore orioles showing up at backyard feeders in Georgia during the winter. Normally, the striking black and orange birds are uncommon to rare visitors in winter. (A few of them nest in the state during summer.) The chance of attracting them to your yard in winter increases if you offer their favorite foods, such as orange halves and grape jelly.
— Flocks of northbound sandhill cranes already are appearing high in the skies over Georgia, migrating back to their summer nesting sites up North and in the Midwest. It seems only a few weeks ago they were heading south to winter grounds in Florida and elsewhere.
— The first waves of purple martins are returning to Georgia for their nesting season from winter grounds in South America. “I woke up this morning to the wonderful music of purple martins … in the backyard,” Larry Gridley of Albany reported this week.
IN THE SKY: The moon is full Saturday night. Venus is low in the east about two hours before sunrise, said David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer. Mars is in the east a few hours after dark and will appear near the moon Wednesday night (Feb. 19). Jupiter rises out of the east just before dark and is visible all night. Saturn rises out of the east about midnight and will appear near the moon Friday night (Feb. 21). Mercury cannot be seen right now.
