Grab Your "Bins" It's The 120th Annual Christmas Bird Count

Birders rejoice, it's the most wonderful time of the year ... to freeze your feathers off counting your local bird population. Audubon's Christmas Bird Count is one of the largest and longest-running community science programs, and generates mind-boggling amounts of bird data. Birdata? Crunching these numbers even informed the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's headline-grabbing study that was released this year, reporting the loss of three-billion birds over the last five decades.

But don't let declining bird numbers deter your twitching in the dawn of Earth's 6th mass extinction, just think of them as mythic-rare Pokémon (or whatever the boomer equivalent of that is). Convinced yet? Before you grab your parka and binoculars and aimlessly wander off into the woods like a total birding newb, read up on how to get involved through Audubon's official onboarding process.

LET THE COUNT BEGIN!

Read more on Gothamist.