Counting Birds
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It was the Christmas Bird Count recently and I like birds a lot, though I’m too lazy to be a serious birder. Still, I have a lot of good bird experiences, especially in Latin America. One of the great moments of my entire life was hiking up to a cliff in Bolivia overlooking a waterfall where Andean condors come every day to bathe and since we were on the cliff, they were riding the winds like 20 feet above us and holy shit, them’s some big birds.
Anyway, my friend Adam Sowards, who has podcasted here with us, has a piece out about the importance of the annual Christmas Bird Count. This may not seem like the most important thing in the world as we prepare to invade Greenland and Panama, but it’s still actually quite important in terms of our environment and our relationship to it.
Local chapters such as Skagit Audubon Society and North Cascades Audubon organize the annual event in their regions.
Each area is divided up into zones where teams follow strict protocols so that year-to-year data stays consistent. Weather may vary wildly from one year to the next and change what birds are observed, but volunteers will count from the same places following the same procedures.
It takes effort.
This year’s data is still being processed, but in 2023, North Cascades chapter volunteers put in 191 hours and covered 682 miles.
This year for the Padilla Bay CBC, which Skagit Audubon Society organizes, 65 volunteers put in roughly 423 hours. They counted 107,560 birds across 122 species.
Over time and across many communities, this data accumulates. Annual summaries are available online going back to the beginning of the last century.
According to the Audubon Society, more than 300 peer-reviewed articles have used CBC data.
This dataset was one of those used in a major study published five years ago that estimated bird loss in North America at 3 billion birds — 29% — since 1970.
To ensure the data is usable, observers must be confident in what birds they hear or see to count them, so the CBC is not an activity for a beginning birder. In spite of that confidence, “there’s probably a certain amount of systematic error” in the count, said O’Hara. “But the fact that the data isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s not useful, because you have it over multiple years.”
The flaws, said O’Hara, will be similar everywhere. Trends emerge clearly.
The North Cascades chapter has been doing the CBC for more than 50 years. Alex Jeffers, who has coordinated the North Cascades chapter CBC the last three years, recently saw the early counts in Whatcom County. Jeffers was stunned to see how many western meadowlarks appeared in those tallies, because grassland birds like that have been in steep decline.
Bird populations are changing dramatically. Climate change and habitat destruction explain much of decline, but some new species are expanding their range and backyard feeders make a difference, too.
Every year, count teams locate rare or unexpected birds and sometimes miss formerly common birds. Jeffers said one in the group identified a western wood peewee, which he believes is a first for the Bellingham CBC. The Padilla Bay CBC located several notable species, including black phoebes, ancient murrelets and orange-crowned warblers. The team counting in Samish Flats did not see any peregrine falcons, where they used to be a regular sight.
One of Jeffers’ mentors taught him a saying: “Birds have wings; they end up in weird places.” So Jeffers is not quick to conclude that birds in unexpected places are necessarily portents of catastrophe.
Still, from its inception, the CBC has been concerned with the vitality of bird populations.
Ultimately, history is the study of change over time. So there’s nothing more hands on in terms of the field of environmental history than documenting changes in bird populations. Mostly, it’s not good as humans are a uniquely destructive species. But sometimes, cool things happen.