Global Big Day — 14 May, 2016
May 14, 2016. The second Global Big Day. We need your help to make it the biggest day of birding the world has ever seen. With less than three months until the day, it’s time to get started!
Last year, thanks to participation from eBirders worldwide, we were able to engage more than 14,000 people in 135 countries to submit almost 45,000 checklists, featuring 6,085 species of birds. All in a single day. More importantly, it introduced eBird to hundreds of new people, resulting in thousands of valuable checklists of bird sightings that are used for science and conservation worldwide. Thank you to all who participated, and we look forward to seeing many new faces joining the ranks this year!
If you could get two friends excited about the Global Big Day and each of those people help with spreading the word, imagine how many people would take part! We really hope that you’ll take this as a great opportunity to unite the entire birding community behind a shared cause: how many birds can we find in a single day? 2015 GBD outreach had just one month of lead time, and much of this information came too late for it to be as useful as possible for our passionate users like you. This year we are starting early!
There are many ways to get involved with Global Big Day. At its simplest, participation in GBD2016 just means that you go birding and submit an eBird list from that day. May 14th is also International Migratory Bird Day, the day of the North American Migration Count, and just a great time to be outside in nature. Our partners around the world also have several May 14th events—great causes like the World Series of Birding in New Jersey and the Great Canadian Birdathon. Please support these events too—and submit sightings to eBird!
To help get people excited for GBD, we’ve developed a couple of one-page documents that can be shared to provide a great starting point for potential GBDers: Taking Part in Global Big Day (how to participate), and Sharing GBD with Friends (how to engage others in regional events, etc.). These two documents are a starting point for outreach, providing ideas and easy resources to use as needed. They’re also available in Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Chinese (Traditional), and German. Find these documents at the above links or our Global Big Day HQ page, a one-stop-shop for GBD info.
Facebook events are also a great way to reach people, especially so far in advance. See the main eBird GBD2016 Facebook Event. It also would be great to have regional events in your area that we could link to from the main event page—please let us know if you organize one.
We’ll be posting additional information over the coming months on the eBird homepage and Facebook page, ramping up even more in mid-April—at which point we’ll be in touch again.
We’re excited to see what we can build together as a part of #GBD2016. We’d love to hear any suggestions that you have for engaging birders, and we can’t wait to see GBD2016 develop. Thank you for taking part in 2015, and we eagerly anticipate your 2016 Global Big Day reports. In case you couldn’t tell, we’re really looking forward to this, and hope you are too!