Hosted by the Golden Gate Audubon Society, San Francisco’s annual bird counting event will take place on 27th of December.

Volunteers will gather just before dawn and watch and count birds until dusk. They will band together at sixteen points on land and one on water to count bird species for fun and science.

The San Francisco Christmas Bird Count is one of the more than two thousand similar events that are organized from Guam to Labrador and from Alaska to Chili during the final two weeks of every year. This year’s event will mark the 34th local annual bird count.

During last year’s event, a total of 128 birders participated and counted a record number of 73,095 individual birds from a total of 184 species.

Separately, the annual Columbia Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count was recently organized, marking the 60th local effort in support of a national annual event.

The annual event is now a totally different winter tradition from what it used to be more than a century ago. Originally, it was a hunting event but the National Audubon Society successfully changed into a bird census on Christmas Day of 1900 by encouraging people to shoot birds with cameras rather than guns.