28 December 03

Christmas Bird Count—A Bit

Every year a bird census is taken in winter during a two-week period around Christmas. It is the largest volunteer data collection activity in the world. Thousands of people go out in all weathers to count the birds in a given area and tally them at the end of the day. Spikes or dips in populations can be seen and hopefully explained. It’s a good and useful activity, even though it has a tendency to become an exercise in finding rarities (irrelevant to science) and competitiveness (ditto).

We were not signed up to do the Bodega Bay count this year because there seemed to be no leader; we had a dinner engagement that morphed into brunch this morning; and we had the fall-back excuse of a dodgy back and achilles tendon, respectively. We got a last-minute plea to do a very abbreviated count yesterday. This means that today we counted robins, starlings, housefinches, California quail, and turkey vultures in and around French toast with poached dried fruit in a citrus sauce at the fabulous new organic eatery in Bodega Bay, the Seaweed Cafe. Melinda and Jackie are taking January off for a well-deserved rest but will be back in February. The dinner menu is not great for vegetarians (though seems spectacular for omnivores) but brunch is superb. Incredible teas.

If any of my serious birding friends are reading this, yes, we know we’re slouches. We didn’t find the immature goshawk and we failed in our mission to find a rough-legged hawk or even a cowbird. Next year.

Posted by at 07:31 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. Though not avid bird watchers, after our enjoyable brunch with some terrific company, we found ourselves making note of the egrets, wood ducks, geese, robins, sparrows, sandpipers, hawks, and a turkey vulture we saw near and around Salmon Creek on Sunday (please forgive our lay-persons’ terms if we have misnamed, and we would love for someone to tell us the name of the beach bird with the very long beak running briskly on the beach, frequently burying its beak in the sand for a morsel of something or other). Mostly, we thought of our bird-loving friends (and Chris thought of the secret life of bees, for some reason).

    love,
    Karen and Chris

    — Karen and Chris    29. December 2003, 17:25    Link
  2. While some might call you slackers, I’m thrilled you got into the “game”, albeit a little late. One count in our area, Newburyport, affords birders the opportunity to go into areas not usually available to birders and finding numbers of birds otherwise unknown. Unusally mild weather in the NE made for a grand day to be counting wintering birds.And by the way, the brunch sounded grand!

    — tattler    29. December 2003, 17:25    Link

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