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Chip in to conserve birds
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Become a Volunteer.
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Experiences for ages 2-17!
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Existing volunteers
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Another summer in the Northern Great Plains has come and gone, now fleeting as quickly as it arrived. With it, the many birds who travel thousands of miles to call these grasslands home during the breeding season have begun to make the long journey back to their wintering grounds. For the many ranchers and farmers of eastern Montana, the work is not done.
Once a year each winter, dozens of volunteers congregate at Barr Lake State Park to dedicate their day to a singular purpose: tally every bird of every species seen within a 15-mile diameter circle centered on Barr Lake. This tradition has been taking place every year since 1980 at Barr Lake, but the origins of the Christmas Bird Count (CBC) go back much further.
Being a birder means a lot of different things to many different people. Some birders go out every week to count and list as many species as they can find, while others have a yard list of the birds they identify from their window. Read below for a guest blog from Eric DeFonso, a Bird Conservancy seasonal field crew leader for our Integrated Monitoring in Bird Conservation Regions (IMBCR) program. Eric shows how sometimes, birding by sight is not always feasible or possible.
My name is Emily Munch and I was the first ever Banding Trainee for Bird Conservancy of the Rockies at the Barr Lake banding station this past fall. My role was to learn how to safely extract birds from mist nets and how to identify, age, sex, and band birds.
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