Celebrate Urban Birds (CUBs) invites families to go outside, describe their environment, look for 16 focal bird species, and report their observations to help scientists examine how habitat affects birds. Repeat observations are encouraged, so families return to the outdoors, where they notice how environmental change influences the presence, absence, and behavior of birds. Beautiful posters in the activity kits make bird identification appealing and easy, and forms are provided for reporting data. While learning about birds and the importance of local habitat, families become more comfortable exploring the outdoors and getting hooked on birds, natural history, animal behavior, and birding.
Celebrate Urban Birds is designed to be accessible to urban families but can also be used in suburban and rural neighborhoods. Mentors, including parents, initially go outdoors with children. The process of observing and naming reduces fear of being outside by replacing unknown with known. Our suite of tools uses the arts to engage kids and hooks parents by promoting math, science, and reading skills in a tangible and attractive way. Data are used in real university research, and kids feel they are contributing to nature and bird conservation. The celebratory atmosphere on our web site invites creativity and enjoyment.
Participants use CUBs repeatedly, at different times of day and in varying weather, seasons, and locations. The project reaches diverse audiences using proximity, technology, simplicity, repeatability, and educational value. We’ve begun to have great impact. With funding we can reach full potential, printing many more kits and providing support for large-scale, continuous participation. We plan new outdoor/technology activities to help kids learn to identify additional species (migrants) and observe behavior, using cell phones, photos, movies, and audio to document and share observations. We also plan to organize special events, create user groups to connect participants, and make meet-the-scientist role-model videos (especially of minorities and females).

Two issues prompted this work: (1) a desire to bring this kind of education to urban audiences, particularly those audiences poorly represented in science and (2) a desire to include all areas, not just the affluent areas, of cities in urban ecology work. These issues influence both human and scientific outcomes.

We have discovered that local partnerships are key; after three months we had more than 1,000 partner organizations sign up. Since that time we have struck deals with the National Wildlife Refuge System (signing at the Department of the Interior in February, 2008), and we have interest from the National Park System. Launched in Harlem and throughout New York state in 2007, the project quickly went national and international, pointing to a need to explore using this tool to track migrant birds in cities throughout the western hemisphere.

People are getting outdoors, learning about birds, and learning to enter data online. Responses have varied from a woman who was in tears after being handed a kit because it was finally something she could do in Spanish with her English-speaking children to youth who said that they had never really thought of themselves as scientists before. The numbers are encouraging as are the narratives from participants.