Hi, this is Nikki Belmonti, Executive Director of the American Birding Association.

I want to thank all of you who have supported this year's nesting season appeal.

If you haven't had a chance to support our campaign, I'm asking you for your support now.

Visit us online at aBA.org slash appeal or call us at 800 8502473.

Our work is made possible by the generosity of donors like you. Thanks and enjoy this

week's podcast. Hello and welcome to the American Birding podcast from the American Birding

Association. I am your host, Nate Swick. It's my very favorite time

of the year. It's breeding bird survey season, the very best of the bird community science

initiatives, in my opinion. Sorry, Christmas bird count. Just not rigorous enough.

Breeding bird surveys combine three of my very favorite things about birding. There's

obviously the actual looking at birds, mostly listening for birds, of course, plus the coverage

of seemingly innocuous areas where you can find cool stuff. I love covering my outlying counties,

and third, the pages and pages of bird data on spreadsheets, which I have to admit,

attracts me like a moth to a porch light or a nightjar to the moths at a porch light or an owl to

the night jar to the moths at the porch light. So right now I am in the middle of my BBS runs.

I've done the first one.

I have another one in the period between when I'm recording this

and when this episode releases,

and then my last one this weekend.

Breeding bird surveys are great because it is just the same thing.

Every year, the consistency, the repetition. that's how you get the good bird data.

But this year I did do something different. I used Merlin's sound identification AI on my route.

...