Christmas Bird Count 2011
“There are three things you can count on today,” I told Laura, who was along for her first Christmas Bird Count. “Around eleven in the morning you will wonder why you signed on to do this. Around three in the afternoon you’ll wish you were home asleep. And at the end of the day you will be elated.”
This was my second Christmas Bird Count and the memory of my first count was vivid for me. Last year had been exhausting and exhilarating and I had been looking forward to this day more than to Christmas itself. Like for all good holidays, I’d spent the day before cooking so that we’d have good chicken soup to eat in the field. We’d gone to bed early and I rose at 3 am, full of hope, just as I had as a child when I still believed in Santa. Now, I believed in owls. To find an owl, you have to believe in owls.
Yellow-bellied sapsucker taken in 2010 by Peter SchoenbergerBelief took us far. We started with the eerie call of a screech owl in the low fields of our count sector; a quick trip up toward dense pine trees brought a saw-whet owl that came in and soared over our heads; a barred owl hooted from the dark, and a great horned owl did the same.
Then the sun rose, a marvelous display as we roamed the fields looking for snow buntings (with no luck). And our daylight hours began. It is hard to top hearing four owls in such a short period of time. But six hooded mergansers with their striking white hoods that puddled about in an open pond cheered us on as we rounded up the chickadees, tufted titmouse, and cardinals to our list.
Despite the owls, by eleven our spirits were flagging. Birders are addicts, looking for the next bird high. Our last one had been at 5 in the morning, six hours ago. I was hungry. My body already felt tight from getting in and out of the car, walking a few miles, driving many more.
As we cruised through a dense woods on a one and a half lane road, Laura said, calmly, from the back seat: a big bird. Laura’s keen eye had already brought us many red-tailed hawks at the edges of fields. Peter braked, backed up. And the big bird was sitting in a tree, staring back with its barred owl eyes. That gave us the adrenalin we needed to get us to three, when again my spirits flagged.
“Big bird,” Peter said pointing to a dot, impossibly high in a blue sky. An eagle. “Let me be sure it isn’t a golden eagle,” he said. A scoped look made us all conclude it was a golden eagle and we had another rush of excitement (analyzing the photos later, however, told another story—it was a bald eagle).
We continued our counting, little marks next to the crows, blue jays, a flicker, a yellow-bellied sapsucker, many downy and hairy woodpeckers. A reliable kestrel waited until 4:30 to make an appearance. And then after driving 100 miles and walking 5, our day was over. We gathered for food and drink with others from our circle, also red-faced from the wind and sun of the day, also tired but happy. There were reports of some good birds, like the stocky white-winged scoters from the Ashokan reservoir. There was the discussion about the enormous flock of grackles that moved from one sector to the other: how should they be counted. The total tally of birds was somewhere around 10,000. That, above all, cheered me. When I think of all the animals I see crushed on our roads, or read of birds that collide with buildings and into windows I worry about declining populations of all creatures in the wild (except starlings and house sparrows, perhaps). As I ate the food prepared by friends, and listened to the chatter about birds, all I thought was these birds are the real gift of this season.