A common goldeneye (Bucephala clangula) sea duck comes in for a landing in Scott, MN. (Daniël Cronk)

Glorious to View

Feathered & Fabulous: Images from the 2026 Great Backyard Bird Count

The annual event had more than a million participants around the world; feast your eyes on a small sampling of its 200K+ photos

Editor’s note: All images are courtesy of the Macaulay Library at the Lab of Ornithology.

By Beth Saulnier

For four days each February, volunteers fan out around the globe to record local bird sightings, capturing a remarkable worldwide snapshot of avian populations. The event, co-run by the Lab of Ornithology, is known as the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC)—and it just keeps getting bigger.

The GBBC was founded in 1998 by the Lab and the National Audubon Society; a third parter, Birds Canada, signed on a decade later. Now, it draws individuals, birding clubs, school groups, and more; using the Lab’s Merlin Bird ID app and eBird platform, participants report sightings from all seven continents.

The 2026 count drew (per initial numbers) some 1.15 million people from 216 countries or eBird subregions. They made 1.24 million Merlin identifications and submitted nearly 470,000 eBird checklists—all told, spotting more than 8,200 avian species.

Participants made 1.24 million Merlin identifications and submitted nearly 470,000 eBird checklists—all told, spotting more than 8,200 avian species.

“A huge amount of people participate, and I think part of that is because it’s a concentrated period of time,” observes GBBC project leader Becca Rodomsky-Bish. “Not everybody is going to become a devoted Merlin or eBird user—but if you ask them to do it for 15 minutes on one of four days, it’s pretty attainable for just about anybody.”

Among the notable happenings in 2026 were rare sightings of the European robin (Erithacus rubecula) in the Canadian provinces of Québec and Ontario and a massive flock of 120,000 King penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) in the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, a British territory in the southern Atlantic.

Not everybody is going to become a devoted Merlin or eBird user—but if you ask them to do it for 15 minutes on one of four days, it’s pretty attainable for just about anybody.
Becca Rodomsky-Bish

And here’s another whopping number: this year, GBBC participants made nearly a quarter-million submissions of media to the Lab’s Macaulay Library, the archive that houses more than 95 million photos, videos, and sounds.

Here’s a small sampling of the eye-popping images submitted during the 2026 bird count: