Most casual birdwatchers balk when it comes to birding in miserable weather. It’s too cold, too wet, too muddy and just too uninviting to venture out. Even experienced birders think twice about dealing with December’s weather.
Yet at least a couple of hundred county birders will join tens of thousands of birdwatchers for the annual Christmas Bird Count. Wearing or packing binoculars, scopes, identification books and hot drinks, the locals will count birds in two 15-mile-diameter circles located mostly in Snohomish County, one roughly north (Dec. 30), the other south (Dec. 16).
The CBC tradition came as a counter to the holiday tradition of the Christmas side hunt, where hunters chose sides and set out to shoot as many birds as they could to see who got bragging rights.
(But before CBC came Harriet Hemenway’s and Mina Hall’s 1896 lobbying effort of Boston society ladies, encouraging them to stop buying hats with feathers. Their series of meetings led to the founding of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. By 1916, local chapters started in Washington state.)
The first count was on Christmas Day in 1900. Despite the lack of email, Twitter, Facebook and all their kin, 27 serious birders participated in 25 counts from Toronto, Ontario to Pacific Grove, California. Those birders combined identified 90 species.
Today’s CBC typically has about 30,000 volunteers worldwide counting more than 2,400 species, providing invaluable and free data that researchers, advocates and policymakers use, particularly for topics on long-term health of bird populations and migration trends.
The 2016 South County CBC fielded 97 people in 32 teams in the field including four crow-counting teams, plus 75 people counting at 59 feeder sites, adding up to 126 species (34,407 individual birds, according to Rick Taylor, co-compiler with Bob Schmidt of the CBC data).
The circle extends into part of Seattle, unincorporated King County, and the tip of Whidbey Island.
Susie Schaefer of the Pilchuck Audubon Society is one of 14 area leaders. Her teams work the Mukilteo area that includes Puget Sound, urban settings, wooded parks, creeks and ponds that offer a wide variety of species.
“Some years, we do very badly on the ponds because they’re frozen and we don’t have any ducks,” Schaefer said. “The last couple of years, we got started really early, 4:30, to listen for owls. We have a hard time finding them. The first year, we turned up a sawhet. The second year, we didn’t find any.
“It’s dicey calling owls. If you start with the little ones, they may answer but the (larger) barred owls can come in and eat them, and if you start with big ones, we’ll never going to get the small ones.”
An early start for all is imperative. “We’re racing with the light,” Schaefer said. “You can’t see the colors on the birds by 4:40 p.m.”
How a team is formed depends on your philosophy. Most teams mimic Schaefer’s approach: inclusive, welcoming all levels of expertise and placing experience with inexperience. Her team usually consists of about 10 counters. Last year she included three teenagers. The other, less-popular philosophy is to engage only the best birders for (possibly) more accurate counts or a better chance to identify unusual or rare birds.
The South County circle includes a huge crow roost located at the University of Washington-Bothell campus. Schaefer might send an inexperienced birder or two to work the crow area. “A crow clicker who can’t tell one bird from another can click crows all day long.”
The CBC data-collection machine has widened its net with feeder counts. Residents can sit in the warmth of their homes on a growly December day and count birds at feeders. Call or email the contacts below to find out if your address is in the circle, or if you want to join others in the field.
Here are the contacts for both counts:
South (Dec. 16): Rick Taylor, 425-214-2764, taylorrl@outlook.com; Bob Schmidt, 425-273-1579, bobs@world-wide.com.
North (Dec. 30): Scott Atkinson, scottratkinson@hotmail.com
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or songandword@rockisland.com.
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