COUNTING THE BIRDS
Every Sunday morning in winter, Mark Ellison gets up before sunrise and walks to a lake on the edge of Norwich, in the east of England. He sits on the same bench, takes out his binoculars1 and a small notebook, and begins to count. Each time a bird lands on the water, he writes down what kind of bird it is and the time he saw it. "I'm not just watching birds, I'm collecting information," he says. "Last Sunday I counted 212 ducks and three swans."(lines 1–5)
Ellison, a bus driver, is one of more than 50,000 volunteers in Britain who count birds for science. "Scientists can't be everywhere at once," he explains. "To find out whether a type of bird is doing well or disappearing, they need numbers from thousands of places, year after year. No research team could ever afford to collect all that information by itself, so volunteers like me fill the gap. Thanks to our counts, we now know that some birds that used to be common, such as the house sparrow2, have become much rarer in cities. So if you want to help protect wildlife, you don't need a degree. You can help by counting the birds in your own garden for one hour a month and reporting what you see."(lines 6–12)
Many volunteers also count birds that are difficult to see. One of them is Rachel Ford, a hairdresser, who listens for birds at night. "I leave a small recorder3 in a field for a few hours. It picks up the calls of birds that fly over in the dark, and later a computer program helps me identify each call," she explains. "Of course, we are never allowed to put a recorder on a farm without asking the farmer first. Most farmers agree happily, though. They want to know which birds visit their land at night."(lines 13–17)
However, not every report is accepted straight away. Under the rules of Britain's bird-counting projects, a report of any very rare bird must be checked by experts before it is added to the national records. Usually the volunteer has to send a photo or a recording as proof. "Last spring, I sent in several recordings of birds I thought were unusual," says Ford. "Most of them were not accepted because the sound was not clear enough. But one was the call of a night heron4, a bird that is rarely seen in England. The experts confirmed it, and now visitors to a museum in London can listen to my recording!"(lines 18–23)
"Nobody pays us, and we don't do it for the money," says Ellison. "Some Sunday mornings it's freezing by the lake, and some nights Rachel hardly sleeps. But for all of us, counting birds is simply a way of feeling part of nature again."(lines 24–26)