dendroica: Citizen scientists have been taking an annual ‘bird…
As snow, wind and rain kept many of us cozy inside our homes this December, thousands of bird-watchers grabbed their binoculars and headed out for a day in the elements.
Theirs was no average bird-nerd-devotion: They were on a mission to count every bird they saw or heard, as part of the National Audubon Society’s 117th annual Christmas Bird Count.
The count, which begins every Dec. 14 and wraps every Jan. 5, is a census of local bird populations.
Taken at the end of the fall migration, the census provides a snapshot of “how many of which birds are where” — valuable data for scientists studying everything from climate change to the effects of West Nile virus. Results from this year’s tally are still pouring in, but last year, 77,000 birders recorded just under 59 million birds across the United States, Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. The birds they counted represented roughly one-quarter of the world’s known bird species.
“The beauty of the [Christmas Bird Count] is that we really are getting a yardstick on everything that’s out there on a continental basis at the same time of year, and we can actually really track what’s happening over time with a lot of the species,” says Geoff LeBaron, Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count director.
LeBaron explains that the Christmas Bird Count dates all the way back to 1900, when ornithologist Frank Chapman proposed counting birds over the holiday, rather than hunting them. In addition to collecting bird observation data, the count also tracks “effort data,” which helps scientists accurately interpret bird count results.
“So, in a year like this, where potentially, weather is impacting the number of people that are out there and how they can get around, [the count] is still valuable data because we’re tracking ‘birds per party hour,’” LeBaron says. “We can then sort of measure how much effort was expended to actually count all the birds that are tallied every year.”
My local count tallied 105 species this year, the third-highest total in the history of the count, partly thanks to a rare day of good weather. My group recorded 49 species, including the count’s only Great Cormorant.
Nice! We got more species in our count (while getting our butts kicked by the count up the road that tends to come in in the top 10 each year, even though it rained on them and didn’t on us), but we have a very unfair advantage over you of living in a warmer climate with a ton of habitat diversity in our circle.
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