Audubon Center Seeks Volunteers For Birdhouse Project

 The Audubon Center at Bent of the River will partner with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to monitor cavity nesting birds during the 2007 nesting season. A training session will be held Sunday, March 18, at 2 pm, at the nature center to instruct volunteers on how to monitor the birds, organize their data, and submit it online. Each volunteer will be assigned at least one birdhouse and should expect to spend one to two hours observing the birds each week during the nesting season.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology-Birdhouse Network Project is a citizen science project designed to include amateurs in valid scientific research. Because the biological impacts of nest boxes on bird populations research are not well known, Cornell ornithologists decided to establish The Birdhouse Network Project. Gathering basic information about nest-box inhabitants, and then subjecting that information to scientific scrutiny, is the first step toward assessing the effect of nest boxes on the cavity-nesting birds that use them. For more information about the Birdhouse Network Project, go to www.birds.cornell.edu/birdhouse.

Audubon educator Jim Drennan will lead the March 18 session. To register, call the Audubon Center at 264-5098, extension 306. For more information, email Mr Drennan at jdrennan@audubon.org.