This is to be Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

On May 9th this year will be the first global big day and the idea is to see if we have people all around the world

on a single day looking for birds how many birds can we find in 24 hours?

Chris Wood of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.

He's the project leader for E-bird.

It's an online database by which bird watchers anywhere on the planet can upload their sightings

and help increase the resolution of our

information on exactly what birds are hanging out where and when. I spoke with

wood on a visit to the lab in April, what are called big days have been local events for counting birds, but the

May 9th big day is for the whole world.

So the hope is that people in India, people in Iran, people in Australia, many of whom are already using ebird.

We'll enter birds that day and see if we can, you know, can we find 3,000 species, 4,000 species, that's really the idea. Just it's one day to go out and explore

biodiversity and see, you know, see this amazing planet that we live on.

And is there going to be any kind of working up of that data for a particular reason?

Yeah, so what we'll do is we ask everybody to enter data into Ebert.

And by having those data in Ebert will give us, you know,

insight into populations of birds at some level,

but it also just allows us to prioritize and think about, okay know here's a here's a region of the world

where you know despite these outreach efforts we don't we haven't engaged as many people

and it allows us to help so we think okay for the next year let's focus here and see if the next year.

All of a sudden the birds that are on Fiji maybe,

if we have reports of them.

...