The first Christmas Bird Count was held on Christmas Day 1900 when Frank Chapman organized 25 of his friends to spend a day in the field censusing birds as an alternative to the prevailing “sidehunt,” where shooting parties went forth and shot any living thing, and the team with the most dead bodies at the end of the day was declared the winner. The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) in the U.S. is organized by the Audubon Society and in Canada by Bird Studies Canada. 2016 will be the 117th CBC and is often referred to as the world’s oldest citizen-science project. The CBC has grown to over 2,500 separate counts mainly in North America but with an increasing number in Central and South America and over 72,000 people participated last year. The long-term database provides a trove of information concerning the populations of mid-winter birds in the New World.
The 38th Sunshine Coast Christmas Bird Count was held on Saturday, Dec. 17 (the first one was in 1979). All counts are conducted within identical 15-mile-diameter circles. The Sunshine Coast circle is centred in Roberts Creek and covers the area from Port Mellon to West Sechelt. This year 20 observers in eight separate parties covered the area as completely as possible during the daylight hours. Unusually for this count, the weather was frigid with the Arctic front firmly located over the entire south coast for a number of days prior to count day, and the temperature only reached 0 degrees. However, conditions were generally good for observing birds with little wind and no precipitation. At day’s end a total of 89 species had been observed, a little below the long-term average, but possibly related to the frigid weather. The highest species total was 105 in 2009. Highlight species recorded were an immature Harris’s sparrow at the Sechelt Marsh and a first winter glaucous gull on the beach at Porpoise Bay Provincial Park. Small numbers of snow geese and white-fronted geese have been present in the vicinity of Hackett Park, Sechelt, for the last two weeks and were present on count day, and a kestrel was observed in the Gibsons area.
One result of the frigid weather that we have previously observed was that red-breasted sapsuckers (a woodpecker) and varied thrushes, both common residents of our local forests, are driven down to sea level by the cold. Both these species were much in evidence on count day. Tabulation of the numbers for each species for the count has not yet been completed and I will address this in my next column.
If you see any unusual or unidentified birds at your feeder or elsewhere, please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or 604-885-5539.
