Christmas Bird Counting to End the Year
29 December - Closing 2024 with small, white birds
Saturday (28th) - yesterday - was the umpteenth Christmas Bird Count (CBC) that J and I have taken part in. This particular CBC takes place in an 8km radius circle centered on the town of Hudson, a little west of Montreal.
“Christmas Bird Count,” I suspect some of you are asking. “What’s that?” Let me quote from the website of Birds Canada …
The Christmas Bird Count is North America’s longest-running Citizen Science project. People in more than 2000 locations throughout the Western Hemisphere participate in the CBC each year. Birds Canada oversees the CBC program nationally, in partnership with National Audubon Society. The program is driven largely by volunteer effort and supporter donations. The information collected by thousands of Citizen Scientists forms one of the world’s largest sets of wildlife survey data. The results are used by conservation biologists, environmental planners, and naturalists to assess the population trends and distribution of birds.
Teams, varying in number from one or two to maybe a half dozen, spend the day finding birds along their allocated route, identifying the species and tallying the number of individual birds. Our route, the one we have done every year for 20 years or more, is quite lengthy and has to be covered by car, while some others can be mostly walking routes. We count birds in a suburban area on the south west of Hudson, in a small mobile home park, down a long road between farms and horse stables … and then pause for lunch. In the afternoon we move southwards into an extensive, flat, agricultural area around the village of St-Clet. Birding that section can be very cold, there being nothing to break the winds … on the other hand it is also the sort of country that overwintering birds down from the arctic find to their liking. Horned Larks, Snow Buntings, Rough-legged Hawks, Northern Shrikes, Snowy Owls and the like. Not that those are easy birds to locate, but when we do there is much rejoicing. Oh, and the icing on the cake is that it is usually very cold negative temperatures coupled with strong wind-chill means you have to be hardy to survive. Having a roadside truck stop near the northern end with a couple of ‘greasy spoon’ food outlets (think Tim Hortons) make things manageable. Despite the weather, we enjoy this day each year. We are getting older, and I suppose will have to hand our route over to someone else 😉 but for now, keep counting those little white birds.
As you can imagine, this was a tiring day and a cold day that brought freezing rain by early afternoon. If you have never driven in freezing rain with your windscreen obscured by a layer of ice over which the wiper blades skid uselessly, then you have missed one of the special features of a Quebec winter - it was not fun. Birding was quite hard this year - the number of birds to be counted has been going down for some years and a lot of peering had to be done to find just the ones we did. Climate change, habitat loss, whatever it is, but the bird population is without a doubt diminishing year by year … everywhere. Snow Buntings for example, we used to see quite reliably in flocks of a hundred or more. Last year we saw none for the first time and this year, although present, they were in three small dispersed flocks of not much more than 20 birds each. No Snowy Owls for us on this year’s count, either … had the periods of freezing rain not limited our vision then perhaps we would have found some? This does not prevent us returning to the area in the next few weeks though, so the search for this winter’s Snowy has not ended. Stay tuned for future updates.
By the time we had finished our official route, got home, warmed up and eaten there was not much time available for finishing this post in time for Sunday delivery … SO: Here are some pictures from this year to give you a flavor of the event, plus a couple from past Christmas Bird Counts … heavy emphasis on Snow Buntings, because they are our favourite winter birds. Magical little creatures.
Bravo for a full day of braving the elements to sight and count the birds on your route! I do wonder how much Bird Flu is playing a factor in there being fewer birds, along with all of the other things you site as making their lives difficult. I will look forward to hearing what you see on your future trips! Thank you again for being out there and doing this!!
I congratulate you for your hardiness, and thank you for your bird counting service, Richard! Looking at your photos, I can actually feel the windchill deep within my bones, even from ~5000 kms away here in balmy southwest Mexico...where my birding is as simple and lazy as looking up from my tablet every once in a while when I hear someone cheeping, warbling or screeching nearby. Granted thought, there is no chance of Snowy Owls down here. ;-) My favourite garden visitor is the Mexican Blue Mockingbird - the opera singer of Mexican birds. (Mexican's call it the bird of 400 voices). Happy New Year - hope you're having a cozy day in front of the fireplace.