Next time someone says citizen journalism is “for the birds,” don’t dismiss it – they might actually be right. That’s because American’s bird watchers have hit upon a very smart approach to gathering ground-level info that citizen journalists, and mainstream media, could well learn from.

Each year for more than a century, tens of thousands of birders, sponsored by the National Audubon Society, conduct what’s called the Christmas Bird Count (it actually runs for several weeks, this season from Dec. 14 until this Friday, Jan. 5).

It’s probably one of the longest-standing example of how large numbers of amateurs can collect widely dispersed data – in this case, all the birds they can spot in one of hundreds of designated areas around the country – that then can be assessed for trends by expert and amateur alike. For the ornithological community, it’s crowdsourcing at its best.

Using the Christmas Bird Count, or CBC, for instance, Audubon says it was able to document the decline of wintering populations of the American Black Duck in the 1980s, after which conservation measures were put into effect to reduce hunting pressure on this species.