In news– The GBCC was held for four days across the world from February 18 to 21.
About Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC)-
- It is a global bird count, during which thousands of birdwatchers all across the world look for birds for four days in February each year.
- Launched in 1998 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, the GBBC was the first online citizen-science project to collect data on wild birds and to display results in near real time.
- GBBC India is the Indian implementation of the global Great Backyard Bird Count.bbbb
- GBBC India is coordinated by e-bird India and Birdcount-India, a coming-together of a number of groups and organizations that are interested in birds, nature and conservation.
- The global GBBC is organized by Cornell University and the Audubon Society in the US.
- The main aim is to get people excited about birdwatching by making it a fun, free and accessible event for everyone.
- The participants can count birds for as little as 15 minutes (or as long as they wish) from a particular location on one or more days of the four-day event.
- Then, they upload their sightings online on eBird (www.ebird.org/india) , the world’s largest biodiversity-related citizen science platform.
- In 2021, the three most common birds reported in India are common myna, red-vented bulbul and rose-ringed Parakeet.
- India also ranked second in the world in the number of species documented during the event.
- As a result of this, a State of India’s Birds report was created, which is a comprehensive assessment of distribution range, trends in abundance, and conservation status for most of the bird species that regularly occur in India.
Source: The Hindu
