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Photo © Al Tuttle

How much time will this project require?

The time you devote to the project is entirely up to you. You may want to search for nests for a few days, for only a couple of hours, or periodically over the course of the season—many birds build more than one nest. However, you should keep in mind that if you do find a nest and want to follow it through the nesting season, you will need to give a bit more of your time, possibly a few hours spread over several weeks. Although we accept nest records from nests that have been visited only once, we encourage you to make multiple visits (once every 3-4 days at most) to the same nest, as this provides us with additional valuable information.

For a typical songbird nest, this means you would only need to make about 10 visits to the nest in total, and only spend about 60 seconds or less during each nest check. From the egg stage to the fledging stage of a single nest this might mean less than an hour of your time over the entire nesting attempt, but the total time required will depend on how many nests you choose to monitor.

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Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Cornell Lab of Ornithology