It's Time for Christmas Bird Counts

After everyone gets done opening their holiday presents and drinking their egg nog, some "45,000 people from all 50 states, every Canadian province, the Caribbean, Central and South America and the Pacific Islands (all areas where the breeding birds of North America spend their winter)" will dig out their field glasses and bird identification books to go count birds in what has become an annual ritual. They count every wild bird they can find; every place they can find them.

The Christmas Bird Counts began in 1900 when ornithologist and conservationist Frank Chapman became upset with a tradition in which hunters went out and shot everything they could. To counter the hunting activity, Chapman started a counting activity. Over the many years since Chapman and his friends started their count, the number of counters and the areas surveyed have expanded greatly. So have the data.

Before the Web became available, count data were reported in regional and national bird magazines. The Web has made it possible to consolidate and publish data more easily, so today you can find out what the counts show by visiting The Audubon Christmas Count Home Page by J.R. Sauer, S. Schwartz, and B. Hoover of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, MD. Let me warn you, though, this site is for specialists.

In addition to some explanatory materials, the site houses the following: Population Trends-Estimates of Bird Population Change Over Time, Annual Indices-Graphs of Bird Population Change Over Time, Annual Indices-Comparison with BBS data, and Abundance Maps-Spatial Patterns of Bird Abundance.

I looked up the population trend (1958-1988) for the Black capped chickadee in Pennsylvania and found out that I needed someone to interpret the data for me. So then I looked up "Information about trends analysis" and found out I needed a degree in higher ed to understand the "Route-Regression Method" of analysis. Trust me. You don't want to go here! The only one of these links I understood was the last: Abundance Maps-Spatial Patterns of Bird Abundance.

You'll find a related site on the North American Breeding Bird Survey to be a friendlier place to visit. This one's got a link to species identification tips. I looked and concluded that you're better off buying a bird identification book than wasting your time here.

All effort is not wasted at this site, however, because you can listen to bird sounds, providing you have a sound card and speakers. Also, there are cool videos of individual species if you have a video player. The bird I picked to preview took five times longer to download than it did to play. Pictures and songs of Central American birds might be of interest to some people.

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