For the 36th year, Earlham College's annual Birding Big Day will bring alumni, students, parents and friends together around the world for a weekend of birding and fundraising. ECBBD 2017 is scheduled for May 5-7, 2017. Last year broke participation records, with at least 84 observers submitting lists totaling 786 species worldwide.
Join the building excitement for this year's ECBBD by connecting with fellow Earlham birders on the Earlham Birders Facebook group, where you can follow the activity on the BIG DAY.
Birding Big Day is a bird-a-thon and fundraiser for the Earlham Fund, which helps provide scholarships to make an Earlham education accessible to students. Each year birders find great joy in joining friends outdoors, the challenge of finding birds, and doing something important for the College.
Support ECBBD with a pledge or an outright gift, and participate as a field observer.
Instructions for Field Observers
Please submit your bird lists in one of three ways:
- STRONGLY PREFERRED: We encourage birders from all locations to enter their lists on eBird, then to share those lists to an “Earlham” communal site. Using eBird for posting your ECBBD results has two great advantages: it allows your observations to become part of the international database; and it will make compiling the overall BBD results much easier for us! Click here for a detailed beginner's guide to using eBird.
- If you are observing in and reporting from the U.S. and do not wish to send in your list by the eBird option, a checklist of North American birds is available. Please don’t insert species (EXCEPT in the spaces at the end of the checklist) or delete species because you didn’t encounter them. This is very important as we may cut and paste your list onto a master list and need them to align directly.
- If you do not wish to use either of the first two options, simply email in your list of birds and one of us will convert it to the common tally.
History of Birding Big Day at Earlham
Earlham biology professors Jim Cope and Bill Buskirk created Birding Big Day in 1982. They nurtured this event and saw it blossom into an annual tradition of day-long birding in the Whitewater Valley.
After Jim passed away in March 2002, Bill opened the experience to even more birding enthusiasts in the Earlham community. Every year since then, alumni, students, faculty and staff form birding teams with the challenge of seeking as many different species they can find in a day.
This event became worldwide in 2009. To date, ECBBD has generated nearly $900,000 for the Earlham Fund.
