[monalisauzi]

Does anyone else struggle with counting individual birds? I talk myself out of submitting a checklist to the "Great Backyard Bird Count" like every year because I worry I'm double counting birds and will mess up their data. When you have a bunch of feeders and live halfway in the woods it becomes an issue of: are there 20 mourning doves or 30? 40 finches or 50?

[Exmoor]

As a long-time eBirder this is something that can be stressful initially, but goes away when you understand more about the math. eBird has excellent documentation of what they hope for [0], but to simplify it I'll just say you should make your best conservative estimate. See one flock of 20 Mourning Doves fly over and another flock of 30 later? Maybe it's completely different birds in the second flock or maybe the initial 20 just picked up some friends? Truthfully the difference in data between entering 30 and entering 50 seems huge, but statistically it's not. In all likelihood you are almost always undercounting common birds and there are probably many more than 50 around if you're seeing a big flock like that.

Don't let feat of uncertainty get you down. A good faith effort to put in estimated data is actually useful, but not entering any data adds nothing.

0: https://ebird.org/news/counting-101/ https://ebird.org/news/counting-201/

[mongol]

I think you should not worry too much about that. There are usually special methods for those cases when it is important to get this right - such as, you need to observe for a set amount of time, and you need to report also the species that you know about but that you don't observe. For the popular "backyard counts", the scientists working with the data knows that it has been collected using a method where these details are not as accurate. Your data can still be valuable, but not to be used for the same purposes.

[sosuke]

I thought they had articles and videos on how to count the birds. Like with the purple martins. How do you count hundreds of thousands of birds? Or bees?