Thanks in part to action inspired by her work, spring is not yet silent. Even if you are only a casual observer of birds, you may have missed the wood thrushes that used to sing at dusk in the woodlot down the road, or the warblers that once crowded the trees in the neighborhood park.
Survey methodology is straightforward.
Completed tally sheets go to the Patuxent Environmental Science Center in Maryland for compilation and analysis. Some cautions are necessary in looking at BBS trends. Routes always follow roads, so birds that avoid edge environments are likely to be under-represented in the count. Moreover, BBS routes are not uniformly distributed throughout the range of any given bird species, so regional differences may be distorted. Despite the caveats, however, researchers see the survey as the best available way of keeping track of North American bird populations, particularly those of migratory songbirds, a group of special interest and concern.