Notes from the Christmas bird count
The Christmas Bird Count has been running for well over a century. Volunteers across the continent each pick one day between mid-December and early January and count every bird they can find inside a fixed fifteen-mile circle. The results go into one of the longest-running wildlife datasets in the world.
Our local circle is divided into sections, and for the third year running I was assigned to the stretch that includes the marsh, the river mouth and a rather unloved industrial estate. My partner for the day was a retired teacher who has done the count for more than twenty years and can identify a sparrow from a single chip note.
We met at 7:30 in the car park by the sewage ponds, which is, I promise, a famously good place for birds. It was 34°F with a light north wind and patchy cloud.
Some highlights from the day, roughly in order:
- Hundreds of dunlin wheeling over the mud flats at low tide, turning in perfect unison from dark to silver.
- A peregrine falcon sitting on a light pole in the industrial estate, completely indifferent to the forklifts below.
- A single female bufflehead on the sewage ponds, which made my partner unreasonably happy.
- A flock of cedar waxwings stripping a hedge of berries outside a tyre shop.
- A Virginia rail that we heard but never saw, grunting from the reeds.
Counting forces you to look at every bird, not just the interesting ones. Forty-one crows is still data.
By the end of the day we had recorded 58 species and just under three thousand individual birds, most of them gulls, starlings and dunlin. The total for the whole circle, announced over soup at the community hall that evening, was 112 species, which is about average for us.
What I like most about the count is that it is unglamorous. There is no prize for finding something rare, and the dull birds matter as much as the bright ones. Over decades, the totals for common species are what show the slow changes: fewer of some, more of others, a few new arrivals moving north.
My notebook from the day is a mess of tally marks, crossings-out and wet smudges. I have copied it out neatly for the compiler, but I am keeping the original. It is a good record of a cold, happy, slightly ridiculous day.