Aaron E. Hirsh’s guest column yesterday in The Wild Side, one of the New York Times‘ science blogs, touches on a subject near and dear to my heart: the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, one of the longest-running experiments in Citizen Science this country has ever seen. I’ve participated in the last 5 years of counts in Palm Beach County, and look forward to doing many more.
The CBC is an example of how to do “big science” in ways that involve the people who pay for it. On the one hand, it’s blatantly self-serving: without a public that is sufficiently interested in (i.e., educated about) science, cool projects like the Large Hadron Collider would never get off the ground (or, in the LHC’s case, under it). So it pays to have projects that the public can participate in, so they’ll be more sympathetic to the projects where they can only participate via their tax dollars.
On the other hand, when I’m filling out my forms for the CBC, there’s no denying the sense that I’m connected to a larger enterprise, and that sense of connection is, in a word, fun. I enjoy participating in these vast enterprises, even if my participation barely even registers. One year my party was the only one with a Florida Scrub-Jay in our circle; it felt like I had really contributed then. Most years, though, my data is just one small part of the picture. And that’s fine.