Ovenbird BBS Trend Map, 1966 – 2011.
Each year during the height of the avian breeding season, participants skilled in avian identification collect bird population data along roadside survey routes. Each survey route is 24.5 miles long with stops at 0.5-mile intervals. At each stop, a 3-minute count is conducted. During the count, every bird seen within a 0.25-mile radius or heard is recorded. Surveys start one-half hour before local sunrise and take about 5 hours to complete. Over 4,100 survey routes are located across the continental U.S. and Canada, 23 of them are in Vermont.
BBS data provide an index of population abundance that can be used to estimate population trends and relative abundances at various geographic scales. Trend estimates for more than 420 bird species and all raw data are currently available via the BBS web site.
More than 450 scientific publications have relied heavily, if not entirely, on BBS data. The entire BBS bibliography is viewable in PDF format.
