My Way: A Backyard Checklist

When did you see that white-throated sparrow at your feeder? How many hummingbirds did you see on that amazing spring day? What species can you expect to see at your house in a given season? All these questions can be answered with accurate and organized record-keeping.

You may think that writing down the birds you see is not important, but it is. For years after I got started in birding, I wrote nothing down, except for checking off birds on a "life list"--a list of all the birds I had seen in my life. Everything else I had to remember, and memory alone wasn't enough.

I wanted to know when to put the hummingbird feeders out in spring to catch the first migrants. I couldn't recall if they arrived in March, April, or May, so I was stuck with putting the feeders out in February. I wanted to know if I had really seen a lazuli bunting on our property, or if it was just a figment of my imagination (wishful thinking). Again, I was stuck. I couldn't include it on my newly made property list.

There had to be a simple solution to this problem of keeping records. Sure, there are many computer programs that let you type in lists or sightings, but for me that takes time (I'm not a computer person). You can use a journal to record sightings, but that also takes time to write in all the information.

I needed to find a way to record sightings of the birds on our property without too much hassle, so I composed a list of all 88 bird species I had seen in my yard and put boxes next to each name to make it into a checklist. Every day that I went birding on our property, I printed out a copy of the checklist and checked off the birds that I had seen. As checklists from different days built up, I put them into a notebook to keep them together.

After a year of doing this, I was able to see patterns and facts that I had never noticed before. Not only did I know the exact day that the first migrant of each species showed up, but I also knew the last day I saw it before it left. I also had an idea of how common each species was in different seasons, judging by how often it was checked-off on the checklist. I knew exact dates that I had seen unusual birds, and what the unusual birds were. The amount of data was immense.

This year I am working on improving the system. Each day that I fill out a checklist, I write down an estimate of how many individual birds of each species I have seen. This takes very little time but provides even more data to analyze. I can see relative abundance of species, and graph them against each other. I can average the number of individual birds I see in a day in each season. I can plot the individual totals for each species over time, to see how they fluctuate through the course of a year.

Next year, I might add hours spent in the field, weather, time of day, even number of birds found in a specific area in a given amount of time. Ahh, science.

No matter how far you go with it, keeping track of the birds you see in your yard is an enjoyable and educational activity. So make up a checklist and start recording!