From the Community
NestWatch
Additional Resources
NestCams
NestWatch website
NestWatch on Facebook
NestWatch on Twitter
NestWatch on Flickr
NW on InformalScience.org
Description
An interview with Tina Phillips, Cornell Lab of Ornithology:
Project Leader of NestWatch and NestCams.
Transcription of Interview with Tina Phillips
NestWatch... you actually have people going and checking on nests. Finding nests or providing nest boxes and doing regular checks to get information such as the number of eggs, the species, the date the first egg was laid, the number of eggs that hatched, the number of nestlings that survived long enough to fledge.
You know, I think people when they start out there's nothing like that first time you open up a nest box and you see eggs or young. But that experience gets played out for as long as you do it. It doesn't really dissipate as you continue to do this, I mean that's why people, once they start, they tend to do this for many, many years.
So we have about 7,500 participants. And since I started with this program 10 years ago, that number has really tripled, and even quadrupled, in the last 10 years. We have about 92,000 nesting records, that date back to 1997.
For a lot people, this is sort of their outlet for science and the same goes for...we hear people just wanting to participate in research that is part of a larger conservation effort. So, for a lot of our participants, it is a re-connecting with nature, obviously, but they also feel a great sense of satisfaction by being part of something bigger—that is not only helping science but helping conserve birds and their habitats.
And then of course we set them up with a lot of resources on our website. In addition to ... we have Facebook pages, Twitter pages, we have Flickr pages where they can put their photographs, we have the NestWatch Forum, we have listservs: so there is a lot of opportunity for them to become part of the community and take this very beginner hobby to another level.
And so what NestWatch and nesting observations help us to determine, what are the strategies birds use to reproduce successfully, to pass on their gene pool to the next generation.
A researcher—an individual researcher—across their entire lifetime would never be able to gather a fraction of the information of the data we can collect by citizen scientists. So having this huge mass of data actually allows us to see patterns that would occur in a population of birds regardless of where they are located. So that's what I think is the most powerful thing about citizen science.