Re-engaging with birding and starting a new tradition
If you haven't heard of the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Counts, I don't blame you. To anyone outside of the world of ecology/field biology/natural history, it probably seems crazy to want to spend part of your Christmas counting birds. It's cold, you're supposed to be opening presents with your family, and birding seems like a hobby for retired folks, right?
It's so much more than that though.
First of all, what exactly is the Christmas Bird Count?
To start with, it doesn't have to take place on Christmas Day.
The Christmas Bird Count started in 1900, when an ornithologist named Frank M. Chapman proposed replacing a long-standing Christmas hunting tradition with a bird count. The idea was shockingly successful; the CBC is now considered to be one of the oldest examples of community science (science conducted by "amateur" members of the public). Between mid-December and early January, local Audubon Societies organize counts and assign routes to the various volunteers. The volunteers spend at least a few hours birding along their route, counting how many birds of each species they see. If any birds are deemed "unusual" or "rare," there are additional data sheets to fill out explaining why you're certain that the bird you saw couldn't be any other species. If you can you add a photo.
Then, at the end of the day, you get together to compile the counts! This data is extremely useful to identify long-term trends in overwintering bird populations.
My Christmas Bird Count Experience
With the world as it is COVID-wise, my first CBC did not involve any in-person meetings. Instead, I asked my friend Molly if she would like to join me, roped my partner into it too, and emailed the local Audubon Society's CBC coordinator. She replied with a route that would be a mix of walking and driving, sent us the datasheets, and when December 18th rolled around, we set out armed with binoculars and telescopic camera lenses.
To be honest, I was a little surprised by how little direction was provided. Especially since I had mentioned in my email that I was still new to Laramie and Wyoming birds. But I guess not much more was needed - if you're familiar with birding and you know where you need to go, you just get out there and start looking for birds.
We'd been assigned about a mile of creek, a residential neighborhood, and a small park. We met at the creek at 9am (winter birding in Wyoming does not require early starts - you have to wait for it to warm up a bit!) and started trekking upstream. The coordinator had recommended that we walk in the brush along the stream to try and flush out any snipe, though much to our disappointment, we flushed absolutely nothing. We started counting crows in the distance, Rock Pigeons chilling on the telephone wires, but for the most part, we walked along quietly, listening for any movement or birdsong. Molly was on one side of the stream, my partner on the other, and I was trudging along through the brush in the middle. Our most exciting moments consisted of a bunch of crows mobbing a Red-tailed Hawk, and a Downy or Hairy Woodpecker hanging out in a backyard tree.
After the stream, we zig-zagged back and forth through a neighborhood in the car, driving as slowly as we could and searching the trees and bushes for any sign of movement. My partner felt like we were casing the neighborhood for a robbery, inching along in the car with binoculars in our hands. We started seeing flocks of House Sparrows.
When we finished surveying the neighborhood, we got out of the car again and walked the perimeter of the small park. At one corner, we heard singing and frantically tried to find its source - our count up to that point had barely any songbirds and we were desperate to count something other than American Crows and Rock Pigeons. Molly and I were almost beside ourselves. We knew we recognized the bird song, and that if our friend (and experienced birder) Mel had been there, she would never have let us live it down, but we could not place it. Finally, finally, we spotted movement in some pine trees. After a glimpse of a small, round body, I got one in my binoculars. Small, round, black head, gray body, white eyebrow - it was a Mountain Chickadee. As soon as we knew what it was, the song was obvious. They were practically screaming "chick-a-dee-dee." Embarrassment and relief were equally strong as we finally added the mystery song to our list.
The chickadees were our last new bird species, and shortly thereafter, we sat in a café to do our final tally and drink some much needed coffee. On a Zoom call later that night, I got to sit and listen to other birders report their findings, sharing what was cool, where they saw it. One woman prefaced her report with "you're going to think I lost my weak mind," making us all laugh, before reporting a Black-crowned Night-Heron, a bird one would not expect to see in Wyoming in December!
Re-engaging with birding
It had been a while since I really went birding. While working with Mel in the field this summer, she had tried to help me get familiar with the local bird songs, but our main focus was on identifying plants and collecting water samples. I also joined her and a few others on October Big Day, but the weather was iffy, we were mostly car birding, and I felt like I was unable to recognize anything.
Birding can sometimes be an intimidating past-time. A lot of the people who are very good at it started at an extraordinarily young age - on the end-of-the-day Zoom call, for example, there were two boys under the age of ten who had gone out with their parents and provided us with their final counts. When you're around people who can toss out a bird ID from just a little "chip" sound, not even a complete song, it's easy to feel completely incompetent.
I didn't really start birding until I took an Ornithology class at LSU. I was incredibly lucky to take Dr. J. Van Remsen's last ever ornithology course. Dr. Remsen is an incredibly prolific ornithologist, but he was also a very dedicated professor. I had classes with his daughter, and she told me, that even in that last semester of teaching, he practiced delivering his lectures. Despite his high-level of academic knowledge of birds, he made them accessible to us, providing fun anecdotes and using museum specimens to show us subtle differences between similar birds. When I finished that course, I didn't feel like an expert birder by any means. I still struggled in particular with raptors and shorebirds. But I did feel decently competent at identifying most of the birds found around Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Leaving Louisiana though, first for Texas, then California, and finally Wyoming, made it hard to keep birding. Particularly in California, where the avifauna had little in common with the South. It's been hard to find the motivation to learn my new local birds, on my own, without the guidance of a structured course and access to museum specimens. However, getting out for the Christmas Bird Count has me feeling more motivated to re-engage with birding. We didn't have the most interesting list by the end of the day (only 10 or so species, half of which were European transplants), but it was fun to try and track down the source of bird song, searching for signs of movement, the constant anticipation that something would come flying out of a bush at any moment. Identifying birds feels like belong to a secret society. Sometimes the names are so unusual to the everyday person (Widgeon? Sapsucker? Titmouse?) that it feels like special knowledge to bandy about names that would be almost nonsensical to others. Birds are also such a visible representation of biodiversity too - to know your local bird community is to know something about your local ecosystem. Do you have lots of migrating water birds? What about an abundance of seed-eaters? What species of raptors like to hang out along the highway? Birds can be such an easy window into the natural world.
While filling out my eBird checklists, I was reminded that eBird provides a quiz function to learn birds for a specific location and date. Armed with that knowledge, I think I'll start updating my local bird ID skills. Maybe by the time spring rolls around, I'll be ready to get outside and fall in love with birding anew.
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