Eat more cookies

As the lights come on and the wreaths come out, I’m gearing up for another Christmas Bird Count.  I will again be signing up volunteers, scouting my area, and asking my family to pretty much do without me on a critical December weekend when so many other things are happening. It’s cold. It’s inconvenient. Yet I press on, and so have at least 52,000 other volunteers annually in recent years. Why do we do it?  “Fun” is just part of it.  I suspect that some larger sense of responsibility is at work here too.

The Stillwater CBC began with 6 intrepid souls on Dec. 17, 1939. On that first effort, they counted just 40 species, but those 40 included 25 bobwhites, 82 (!) harriers, 15 (!) Short-eared Owls, and 10 Loggerhead Shrikes.  They found just 10 cardinals, 1 Mourning Dove, and no Canada Geese.  How times have changed.  Last year, 37 volunteers counted 108 species, including 3380 Canada Geese, 233 cardinals, and 89 Mourning Doves.  We found just 10 harriers and 16 bobwhites, and not a single shrike or Short-eared Owl.

Even our local count reveals changes over time that reflect changes in land use, and I suspect we could find similar stories in every count in the state. Given residential development and proliferation of redcedar, I really can’t see where we would put 82 harriers, 15 Short-eared Owls, and 10 shrikes around here in 2008. Ours is a totally different landscape than that of 1939.

We birders play an important role in conservation, every time we do what we love and take the time to share our information with others – especially through organized counts like the CBC. First, keep taking that time – it’s important. We are the best opportunity to estimate populations for several species that winter almost exclusively in the Southern Plains. Second, keep training those beginning birders – they’re not getting that training anywhere else.

I found data online today from a count conducted in my area 69 years ago. Could those 6 people have imagined that I’d be using their data in the year 2008? Will there be anyone to make sense of my data in 2077? I can’t just hope that there will be, I need to do something about it. I’ll have several young people in tow this year, as I do every year.  It may take longer to cover our areas when leading a group of beginners around on our counts, but if we understand at all the value of the CBC, it’s easy to see that the investment in that next generation of birders is even more valuable than the rarest bird we might find on any one count.