It’s an unlikely comparison, but a Christmas Bird Count is a lot like road hunting. Two people in a slow-moving vehicle creeping along a back road, looking, always looking into the woods for any sign of movement, and stopping every now and then at spots along the way known to have been productive in the past. Only instead of guns, CBC birders carry binoculars and a check sheet to tally and keep track of the species they see over a 24-hour period. And they tend to look up at the trees rather than through them.
It’s early on Monday morning, and a handful of people are standing outside by their cars in downtown Island Pond, their breath drifting like smoke through the cold air. Jayson Benoit is handing out topographical maps that have been altered to include a hand-drawn circle representing a 15-mile diameter around Island Pond, the territory to survey. Some of the birders in the group are already on the hunt.
“Did you go owling this morning?” someone says as the group prepares to scatter and go their separate ways.
“Yeah,” says Jayson, who’s been birding since the early ’90s and would like nothing more than to spot a great horned owl, an extremely big bird with a wing span of seven feet or so and powerful enough to sweep away a cat for lunch.
“See anything?”
“Noooo,” Jayson says in a drawl smeared with disappointment. “Never do.”
Birders have been coming to Island Pond for 37 years to participate in the annual Christmas Bird Count that is held across the country under the auspices of the Audubon Society. The count is held essentially to provide ornithologists a handle on the impact that changes in the environment are having on species. It’s strictly a volunteer effort.
“The Christmas Bird Count is all about the power of citizen science,” says Audubon’s director of bird conservation in a recent press release. “Our theme is ‘I count’ because the work of tens of thousands of volunteers, extending over a century, really adds up.”
Jayson, who holds down a job at NorthWoods Stewardship Center in East Charleston and has been a CBC coordinator for the last ten years, says he likes the Island Pond area — or the circle as the birders call it — because it contains the two contrasting habitats where boreal birds are likely to be spotted: stands of softwoods and farmland. The circle the group works in goes as far south as the East Branch of the Passumpsic River in East Haven; north to Avery’s Gore; east to Wenlock Crossing; and west to Bald Hill and the tip of Newark.
The spot of the day, though, comes early near the lake on Island Pond where a woman, who says she doesn’t know enough to be called a “backyard ornithologist,” has been watching a “red bellied” woodpecker visit her feeder. Within minutes of his arrival, Jayson spots the bird with his glasses, a German brand of binoculars with astonishing clarity.
“It’s going to be a good day,” he says, noting it’s the first time a red-bellied woodpecker has been spotted in the Island Pond circle.
Back roads that wind through stands of spruce and fir appear to be the favorite haunts of birders. On the road to McConnell Pond, Jayson parks his car and we walk down a road where a double set of tire tracks suggest that someone has been in and out of camp. Jayson knows the camp and says the owners come in regularly throughout the winter to replenish their bird feeders.
As we make our way down the road, small birds that I would mistake for chickadees flit among softwood trees heavy with snow. Jayson calls them in with a soft call that sounds like a man spitting out more food than he can chew. The birds are golden crown kinglets that frequently “hang upside-down while foraging,” according to the field guide by David Allen Sibley that Jayson keeps in his car. At the camp, our arrival is observed by several “whiskey Jacks,” the name loggers once bestowed upon the gray jay. A flock of grosbeaks, a beautiful yellow bird about the size of a robin, hovers around one of several feeders that run from the back of the woodshed to the camp porch.
It’s a busy spot, what one might call the mother lode for someone counting birds and species. Jayson says his best count during the one-day Christmas count was 17 species, which among the more exotic included crows, pigeons, and gulls. But his most impressive spot of the day this time out comes at around noon as we’re walking down the Gideon Mill Road, named for a man in Island Pond who once ran a sawmill along the Clyde River.
With his glasses up in a flash, Jason spies a bird flying high over a stand of hardwood trees. His day is going from good to better. It’s a goshawk that the guide describes as uncommon to rare to eastern North America. To spot one flying would appear to be a feather in the cap of any birder.
“Best identified (with experience) by overall bulkiness and wing shape,” say the guide.
The most obsequious birds among counters and non-counters alike would have to the chickadee. It is the one bird everyone is most likely to see hovering around the winter feeders. As we travel by the hayfields in eastern Orleans County, Jayson occasionally stops to scope the fence for a bird known as a shrike. They feed on little mammals and little birds during the winter, he says.
But it’s their summer diet that might raise a hackle on a human’s neck. Shrikes prey on large insects like grasshoppers by first catching them and then impaling them on the thorns of, say, a rose bush. There are no shrikes on the fence posts we pass, but there are turkeys feeding in the stubble of the cornfields. More turkeys that even an experienced bird counter like Jayson would imagine.
“I can’t believe it,” he says, adding the count by species on his tally sheet. “The turkeys have passed the chickadees. That’s a first.”
Preliminary reports from the count within the Island Pond circle include the following: one red-bellied woodpecker; four gray jays; one black-backed woodpecker; three boreal chickadees; two goshawks; and 92 turkeys. Total species count was 28, somewhat off the 37-year average of 30.
The CBC count started in 1900 when someone decided to deviate from the tradition of shooting birds, and count them instead.
