About the Club

Mission Statement

The Carolina Bird Club is a non-profit organization that represents and supports the birding community in the Carolinas through its website, publications, meetings, workshops, trips, and partnerships, whose mission is


Join us — Join, Renew, Donate

The Carolina Bird Club, Inc., is a non-profit educational and scientific association open to anyone interested in the study and conservation of wildlife, particularly birds.

The Club meets each winter, spring, and fall at different locations in the Carolinas. Meeting sites are selected to give participants an opportunity to see many different kinds of birds. Guided field trips and informative programs are combined for an exciting weekend of meeting with people who share an enthusiasm and concern for birds.

The Club offers research grants in avian biology for undergraduate and graduate students, and scholarships for young birders.

The Club publishes two print publications (now also available online). The Chat is a quarterly ornithological journal that contains scientific articles, reports of bird records committees and bird counts, and general field notes on bird sightings. CBC Newsletter is published bimonthly and includes birding articles and information about meetings, field trips, and Club news.

The Club provides this website to all for free.

By becoming a member, you support the activities of the Club, receive reduced registration fee for meetings, can participate in bonus field trips, and receive our publications.

Join, Renew, or Donate now!


Other Resources (NOT sponsored by Carolina Bird Club)



The Chat online

At long last, all issues of The Chat from 1937 to the present are accessible from this website. (Access to the issues of the two most recent calendar years is restricted to CBC members.)

Chat issues currently online come from three sources. From 2003 to present (19 years already!), we have the original files from which the Chat issue was published. From 1970 through 2002 we have issues that I scanned. If you have any experience with doing optical character recognition, you know that it is highly prone to error. Think auto-correct or voice recognition on your phone, but much much worse. The reason that my scanning project moved so slowly and eventually stalled is that I was painstakingly proofreading and correcting the OCR results, which was very time-consuming and ultimately exhausting.

In the meantime, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is digitizing the world of natural history and has scanned the entire series of The Chat and put it online. These scans have not been proofed and in places the OCR is badly garbled, which is bad for search but good enough for most purposes, so I have decided just to use the BHL scans from 1937 through 1969 to complete our series. In my opinion, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is not the most user-friendly website so for easier access I have hooked their pages into the table of contents structure that I have already set up on the CBC site, which you can find at https://www.carolinabirdclub.org/chat/issues/. You can go here to find any issue no matter its source.

The issues that reside on the Carolina Bird Club site as pdf files (i.e., issues from 1970 to present) are indexed by Google and other search engines. The Biodiversity Heritage Library appears not to be searchable by Google. It does however have its own search, which seems to be workable, although again, not the most user-friendly. You just need to remember that you have to go to a separate place to search The Chat prior to 1970.

These issues are a great resource for researching old records or any aspect of the history of birding in the Carolinas, or just for browsing.