Whether you’re an expert birdwatcher or just like to catch glimpses of the birds tweeting in your neighborhood, May 11 is your day.
At the May 2 Riverside village board meeting, Village President Douglas Pollock read a proclamation to establish May 11, 2024, in the village as Global Big Day, an annual day dedicated to celebrating birds and birdwatching.
In Riverside, the village is using Global Big Day as an opportunity for residents to “explore and embrace Riverside’s green spaces and the Des Plaines River.” That morning, three village teams and commissions will host bird- and nature-themed events around town, alongside representatives from Brookfield Zoo Chicago and University of Illinois Extension.
From 9-11 a.m., members of the Riverside C4 team will lead a guided birdwatching walk through Riverside’s Des Plaines River corridor, which Audubon Great Lakes designated in 2020 as an Important Bird Area. The walk will start in front of the Riverside Public Library, and interested attendees are encouraged to bring water, comfortable walking shoes and binoculars for birdwatching.
The parks and recreation department will lead a class on making bird houses, bird feeders, binoculars and bird masks from 10:30 a.m. to noon, ending with a scavenger hunt around the iconic Riverside Water Tower. The class is open to all ages, but a $5 online registration is required to attend.
Two events are taking place at Centennial Park. From 9:30 a.m. to noon, Riverside’s landscape advisory commission will give away native plants while representatives from U of I’s Conservation@Home program will hold a table with information on how to garden to support bird and how to identify birds.
From 10 a.m. to noon, Brookfield Zoo Chicago representatives will host a session of the zoo’s ZAP! Conservationists in Action program with exploration activities, bird-related arts and crafts, and cleanup tools to help make a better environment for birds.
Global Big Day is organized each year by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and coincides with World Migratory Bird Day on the second Saturday of May. Birdwatchers of all experience levels from around the world are encouraged to observe and document as many bird species as they can within the 24-hour period. Then, participants can upload their findings to eBird, Cornell Lab’s digital birdwatching platform.
Users are prompted to specify the exact circumstances under which they saw birds, including the address or coordinates of where they were; the date, time and duration of the sighting; whether they saw them while traveling, while stationary, incidentally or otherwise; the distance at which they saw them; how many people they were with; and how many birds of each species they saw.
