North American Breeding Bird Survey -- Adopt a survey route!
David Suddjian
Get Involved in Colorado! Adopt a BBS survey route!
It’s half an hour before sunrise, as you stand beside your car on a quiet rural road. The eastern sky is lightening and birds are singing. You have just begun your first three-minute-long point count at stop #1 of your Breeding Bird Survey route – the first of 50 stops you will visit today. Lark Bunting is singing, three Horned Larks are larking, Mourning Dove, Western Meadowlarks, a pair of Western Kingbirds, and there’s a Say’s Phoebe calling near that farmhouse. It is going to be another fun survey!
Thus begins one person’s volunteer effort for the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS). The BBS is a long-term, large-scale, international avian monitoring program initiated in 1966 to track the status and trends of North American bird populations. Each year from late May to early July skilled birders collect bird population data along roadside survey routes. Each survey route is 24.5 miles long with stops situated 0.5-mile apart. At each stop, a 3-minute point count is conducted and every bird seen or heard within a 0.25-mile radius or heard is recorded. Routes are surveyed just once each season, following the same roads and making the same stops each year. Over 4100 survey routes in the continental U.S. and Canada provide an index of population abundance that is used to estimate population trends and relative abundances at various geographic scales. See what it is all about here in this video: Ups and Downs in Colorado
Colorado hosts 136 BBS survey routes distributed all across the state. Many routes have faithful observers who have been covering them each year for many years. Other routes experience a natural turnover of observers, as one retires from the route and another birder picks it up. And some routes have not been surveyed at all for several years. Colorado now has 20 “vacant” routes that need skilled volunteer observers who can commit to adopting a route for at least three years. (See list below)
Requirements for participation are: (1) access to transportation to complete a survey, (2) good hearing and eyesight, and (3) the ability to identify the breeding birds in the area by sight and sound. Knowledge of bird songs and calls is extremely important, because most birds counted on the surveys are detected by sound. A BBS survey requires about five hours to complete, plus travel to and from the route location.
Can you volunteer to adopt a survey route? Learn more about the BBS here https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/index.cfm and view available Colorado routes here https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/RouteMap/Map.cfm
Contact me directly at dsud...@gmail.comif you are interested in a route or have questions. Route requests made via the BBS webpage may not reach me. Thanks!
David Suddjian, Littleton
Colorado State Coordinator for the BBS
| Updated Mar 6, 2026 | ||
| Route # | Route Name | County Location |
| 5 | Briggsdale | Weld, Morgan |
| 20 | Boyero | Lincoln |
| 37 | Waverly | Yuma |
| 44 | Bethune | Kit Carson |
| 52 | Dolores Riv | Dolores |
| 55 | Alamosa | Conejos, Alamosa |
| 125 | San Luis | Conejos, Alamosa |
| 126 | Cone Mtn | Las Animas |
| 153 | Rio Grande Rs | Mineral, Hinsdale |
| 207 | Amherst | Phillips, Sedgwick |
| 210 | Thomasville | Eagle, Pitkin |
| 214 | Kirk | Kit Carson |
| 220 | Haswell | Bent, Kiowa |
| 307 | Julesburg | Sedgwick, Logan |
| 314 | Burlington | Kit Carson, Yuma |
| 321 | Sheridan Lake | Kiowa, Prowers |
| 322 | Mcphee Res. | Dolores Montezuma |
| 324 | South Fork | Rio Grande |
| 372 | Haycamp Mesa | Montezuma |
| 373 | Lizard Head Pass | San Miguel, Dolores |