The 2010 Great Backyard Bird Count is history, and the results are impressive. Over President's Day weekend in mid-February, North American birders submitted a total of 96,842 checklists that tallied 11,185,368 individual birds and 600 species.

This data gives ornithologists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology a snapshot of mid-winter bird populations that can be compared to earlier counts dating back to 1998. It also gives anyone with just a bit of curiosity access to the same data. What a great source of information for junior and high school students looking for a science fair project? This year's most frequently reported species was the northern cardinal, which was found on 53,262 checklists.

The species with the highest count was the American robin (1,849,444), followed by Canada goose (746,724), snow goose (534,708), American crow (526,376), European starling (513,334), American goldfinch (427,103), common grackle (373,129), dark-eyed junco (372,702), mourning dove (288,868), and red-winged blackbird (286,115).

New York birders led the count with the most checklists submitted at 5,693. Pennsylvania ranked fourth in the nation with 4,861 checklists. Within the state, Pittsburgh led the way with 155 checklists, followed by Erie (106), Mechanicsburg (76), Harrisburg (64), Reading (62) and Philadelphia (61).

Pittsburghers tallied a total of 52 species and 8,066 individual birds. Among the more common species on Pittsburgh checklists were crows (2,392), cardinals (661), mourning doves (443), and ring-billed gulls (352).

All of these results and more are available at the Great Backyard Bird Count Web site (www.birdsource.org/gbbc) for anyone to view and use. Visitors can view several Top 10 lists and check the results from specific locations all across North America. For example, only three checklists came from Nunavut in far northern Canada. Those three checklists reported a total of 12 rock ptarmigans and 265 ravens. Texans, on the other hand, submitted 4,035 checklists and tallied 343 species, including more than 80,000 American robins and nearly 50,000 cedar waxwings.

My favorite section of the Web site is the photo gallery. Here thousands of photos taken by birders during the survey are on display. The quality of many of the images is impressive. Photos from previous years are also accessible.

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