The Annual Christmas Bird Count
By Madeleine Eno
It was Christmas 1900. Within a year young Teddy Roosevelt would be president and Americans would begin to embrace the foreign concept of conservation. But not quite yet. Outdoorsmen still loved their annual “Christmas Snipe Hunt,” in which shotgun-packing revelers headed into the woods to see who could bag the most furred and feathered creatures.
But that Christmas Day, Frank Chapman, an ornithologist and officer in the burgeoning Audubon Society, had organized a kinder, gentler way to be out of doors at the holiday. He enlisted 27 birders to take part in the first “Christmas Bird Census,” counting 90 species in 25 different locations, from Ontario to California.
Today more than 50,000 members bundle up between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5 for the Christmas Bird Count (CBS). Participants in all 50 states, every Canadian province, and Latin America jot down the birds they see. And they’ve never missed a year, even during wartime according to CBC director Geoff LeBaron.
A century of existence has provided some time to fine tune the process. The CBS counting must be done in a single day, midnight to midnight, within a 15-mile diameter circle.
The popular CBS is considered “the grandparent of citizen science projects,” LeBaron says. And the data have finally earned a foothold with begrudging scientists. Prior to the 1980’s, they were skeptical about information gathered in such an uncontrolled manner. But, he says, because “the same people are doing it the same way over years you get valuable trend data.” Also, the sheer volume of the data would be impossible to gather without all these citizen scientists at the ready. Along with stats gathered from Audubon’s Breeding Bird Survey — performed by single observers along roadside routes — the results reveal the changing distribution of birds and ultimately the health of our environment.
A classic example, says LeBaron, is the American robin. Anecdotally speaking, he says, “We’ve been seeing larger numbers wintering further north.” It used to be that the robin’s core wintering range was the southern and southeastern U.S. “You’d expect to see a few here in winter,” he adds, “but now there are tens and hundreds of thousands of birds.” As the snowline slowly creeps northward, these “generalist” birds, which migrate only as far as they to have to, travel less and less.
With the completed numbers (57,704,250 birds were tallied in 2007) ornithologists can look at the shifting ranges and figure out why they are occurring. Them LeBaron says, “We can predict what might happen next.”
One of those predictions is that climate change will most dramatically affect birds with a highly specialized need. These include birds that rely on a very specific stopover point in their epic migration, like the Arctic shorebird landing to feast on horseshoe crab eggs an in the Delaware Bay. They need to double their weight for the rest of their nonstop flight to the Arctic Ocean and if that place or those eggs are gone, LeBaron says, they literally can’t adapt.