Replicating a historic survey from 30 years ago, the Intermountain West Shorebird Survey is a five-year effort to count shorebirds at more than 200 wetland sites across 11 states in the Intermountain West. The program aims to better understand shorebirds and their distribution across wetlands, how that distribution has changed over the past three decades, and how the wetlands themselves have changed. During peak migration—a one-to-two-week period in the spring and fall—a network of volunteers, including state and federal agency biologists, are on the ground, spotting scopes and binoculars in hand, counting shorebirds. …  This is a photo diary from two of those survey teams: one on Great Salt Lake, where over 100 participants surveyed almost the entire lake and its wetlands in one “Big Day” and the other at Salton Sea, where surveyors split their survey between three days.