The Sunshine Coast Natural History Society will be conducting their 42nd annual Christmas Bird Count on Saturday, Dec. 19, and the 30th Pender Harbour count, organized by the Pender Harbour Wildlife Society, is on Thursday, Dec. 17. I will report details from the two counts in my next column.
The first Christmas Bird Count was held in New England on Christmas Day 1900 when ornithologist 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. Fortunately we have moved on from that disastrous ethic and in 2019 the Christmas Bird Count in the U.S. is organized by the Audubon Society and in Canada by Bird Studies Canada. This year will be the 120th CBC and it is often referred to as the world’s oldest citizen-science project. This long-term database provides a trove of information concerning the populations of mid-winter birds in the New World. In 2019, 2,646 counts were conducted mainly in North America with an increasing number in Latin America. Nearly 81,600 people participated, counting 43 million birds of 2,566 species. The highest count in North America was 229 species at Mad Island, Texas; Yanayacu, Ecuador was the overall leader with an amazing 453 species.
Each count takes place on one day during a specified period around Christmas and all are conducted within a circle 15 miles or 24 kilometres in diameter. The Sunshine Coast circle is centred in Roberts Creek and covers the area from Port Mellon to West Sechelt. For the third consecutive year the Sunshine Coast count recorded 88 species (+7 count-week species). The highest ever total was 105 species in 2009. Pender Harbour generally reports 80-85 species with a high of 87 in 1993. The 2019 count was a very low 73 species but the day was severely impacted by wind and rain.
If you see any unusual or unidentified birds at your feeder or elsewhere please contact me at [email protected] or 604-885-5539 so that they can potentially be included in the CBC count.
Good Birding.
