Eideard

My favorite raptor

The official first days of Winter have come with the Solstice and with it the Annual Christmas Bird Count is in full swing. Called the CBC, the first count was done on Christmas Day of 1900, over the last 110-years, with waistlines bulging, thousands of citizens have joined together to volunteer their time to walk off that Pumpkin Pie in the name of science. Count dates vary by area, but are conducted from December 14 to January 5, across the US, Canada, and 19 countries.

Everyone is welcome to participate, Compilers, or group leaders, arrange field parties so that inexperienced volunteers are always out with seasoned CBC veterans. Volunteers will go out over a 24 hour period to count birds following specified routes through a designated 15-mile circle, counting every bird they see or hear all day. If you live within a CBC count area, you can arrange to count the birds at your own feeder and submit the data to the group leader. To find a count in your area just select “Get Involved” from the CBC home page.

Go to the Birds. When the shortest days of the year are giving you the mid-winter blues take a walk through the trees and look up at the birds, you can participate in as many counts as you like, you’ll be giving a hand to science, and you might even find a new hobby or Solstice Tradition.

You can avoid some of the spookier aspects of mid-winter holidays by doing something refreshing and useful, eh?

We bird watchers have Christmas traditions of our own, and the longest running and most important of them is the Audubon Christmas Bird Count.

Frank Chapman started the count as a protest against what were called side hunts. This Christmas tradition involved choosing sides and then shooting every bird in range. The side with the largest pile of dead birds won the day.

Now Chapman was no anti-hunting fanatic; he had collected thousands of birds for the American Museum of Natural History. But on his collecting trips, he witnessed the wholesale slaughter of wading birds for the sake of their breeding plumes. And he recognized the steep decline in bird populations. He became an ardent proponent of bird protection laws and bag limits on game birds.

In the winter of 1900, Chapman proposed that people who loved birds should go out on Christmas Day and count live birds, instead of dead ones.

It seemed like a crazy idea…But somehow Chapman persuaded 27 volunteers to take part in 25 bird counts from California to Ontario. Ninety species were counted that day.

Last year, tens of thousands of volunteers took part in 2,113 counts all over the Western Hemisphere, and 2,267 species were counted. Frank Chapman’s little protest has grown into the largest and longest-running citizen science endeavor in history.

If you see a shivering group of people with binoculars poking around your neighborhood, give us wave. If you want to come shiver with us, drop me a line at blackwellr@comcast.net.

Or contact your local branch of the Audubon Society. They’ll get you set up and sorted out.