Every year, through December and January, people come together for many reasons: to celebrate Christmas, watch fun parades, attend exciting recitals and plays, chat about the future at New Year’s parties, and more.
Many of these traditions have endured for centuries — but there is one more tradition that folks in North and South America have participated in for the past 125 years: the Christmas Bird Count.
In 1900, on Christmas Day, ornithologist Frank M. Chapman began this then-new tradition, in which birders from Ontario to California counted as many species of birds as they could find on that single calendar day.
Twenty-seven people participated in that first Christmas Bird Count, and between them, 18,500 individual birds representing 89 total species were found.
Today, the Christmas Bird Count (CBC) continues for its 126th year, sponsored by the National Audubon Society, and has grown to be one of the largest and longest-running wild bird surveys in history.
Last year, more than 83,100 people participated in Christmas Bird Counts, and between them, they counted over 44,250,000 individual birds from 2,503 different species. The data gathered each year is important for tracking long-term statistics relating to bird species’ movements, populations, distributions, and more.
The rules are fairly straightforward: on one single, predetermined calendar day between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5, people sign up to tally wild birds in a specific “count circle,” a 15-mile-diameter circle that is registered with the Audubon Society and has set boundaries that persist year-to-year.
Teams of field birders (those who travel by foot, car, boat, bike, ski, or even sled dog team) scour every corner of their circle to count birds, while feeder watchers stay home to watch a single area when they can throughout the day within the circle, usually at their bird feeders.
To coordinate all these groups of people each year, a single person per circle is designated to be the “compiler,” the point person who assigns participants to specific areas within their circle, creates teams who can use each other’s strengths in the field, processes all the data from each team, and enters it into Audubon’s CBC database.
Here in Lewis County, we have a CBC Circle that was registered in 2017 by Dalton Spencer, with myself, Rachel Holland, as the current compiler, and it is sponsored by South Sound Bird Alliance.
The Lewis County CBC has consistently gathered faithful participants and incredible data every year since its inception. Our circle encompasses Centralia and Chehalis and includes bird-rich areas such as the TransAlta mine, the first few miles of the Willapa Hills Trail, several city parks, evergreen forests and many fields where wintering flocks gather. We usually tally around 100 unique bird species and an average of over 20,000 individual birds, just in our single little circle — a striking testament to how valuable this area is for wintering birds, and how dedicated our field birders and feeder watchers are.
This year, our Count Day is Saturday, Dec. 20.
If you are interested in joining the CBC, either as a field birder or local feeder watcher, reach out to me at lightningdash09@yahoo.com.
I can work to set you up with a section of the count circle. For more information on the Christmas Bird Count, and to see where all the count circles in North and South America are located, visit https://tinyurl.com/387k2j5x
