For some, the holiday season begins in earnest with gifts, festive meals, family time, new year’s resolutions, and while I love all of those things, for me the celebratory season really begins with the Christmas Bird Count (CBC).
Now in its 125th year, the Christmas Bird Count is the longest running community-science monitoring surveys. The annual count runs from December 15 to January 5, and the data helps scientists and conservationists track bird populations. With more than a century worth of CBC data, we are starting to see a clearer picture of how climate change affects birds, which species are on the decline and need our attention. Last year, the National Audubon Society reported 83,186 participants in the US, Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Pacific Islands who tallied 2380 species counted over 40 million individual birds.
The CBC has an interesting history: In 1900, Frank Chapman, a budding 36-year-old ornithologist and conservationist at the American Museum of Natural History, came up with the idea to replace the traditional Christmas “side hunt,” where participants competed to see who could shoot the most birds and mammals, with a census project. Rather than proudly displaying the carnage results of the winning team in sporting magazines, Chapman invited participants to submit their data to BirdLore, an illustrated bimonthly publication that later rebranded as Audubon Magazine.
The shift from shooting birds to counting them marked a turning point in North American attitudes toward conservation. Chapman was certainly not alone in expressing his outrage at the millions of birds slaughtered in the service of decorative women’s hats, and his work follows in the footsteps of Florence Merriam Bailey, whose field guide, Birds Through an Opera Glass, had encouraged birdwatching without the rifle, ten years prior.
On December 25, 1900, 27 bird counters in 25 North American locations—stretching from Scotch Lake, New Brunswick to Pacific Grove, California—recorded 18,500 individual birds and emerged with a species list of 89. Of the two Canadian observers, E. Fannie Jones, from Toronto remains the hardiest: she spent five hours walking in -4 degrees Celsius, with 16 km/hour northwest winds to tally 15 crows, 1 white-breasted nuthatch, 10 chickadees and 25 golden-crowned kinglets. Hardly a superlative list, but seeing golden-crowned kinglets without binoculars at your disposal is no mean feat.
The first time I took part in a CBC twelve years ago, I was skeptical. Counting birds for an entire day in the freezing cold, with a slight drizzle in the forecast? But what surprised me was how much fun I had. I found myself birding with a community of fantastically hardy people, all of us braving the elements and fully aware of the fact that many would consider our commitment to counting birds in frigid temperatures more than a tad eccentric. Though the counting initially seemed obsessive to me—do we really need to document every single mallard?—what I realized is that the counting itself is less about the numbers and more about accounting for what we’re seeing. To observe closely and better understand the world around us, and to merge that understanding with the larger understanding of others. The counting isn’t the point—it’s just the method.
Among the many lessons I’ve learned from birding, the most important one is to pay closer attention to the world around me and, by extension, to be more attuned to the present moment. Birding, for me, is nothing short of a meditative practice. I’ve now been participating in CBCs for over a decade and not only has the count made me more receptive to the hardy winter birds that call Toronto home, but it’s also given me a new appreciation for my city. Toronto is divided into 26 CBC sectors, and I’ve participated in four of them; I’ve explored new neighborhoods, but the most illuminating experience I’ve had has been right in my backyard. I had always assumed that my semi-suburban quadrant of the city, far north of Lake Ontario, held little in terms of spectacular birds.
And yet it turns out I live just a 5-minute drive from an enormous marsh that I never knew existed! Nicknamed the “magic marsh” by my CBC sector leader, the swath of nondescript swampland nestled close to the Don River is directly under an overpass that I had driven across hundreds of times. I was thrilled of the invitation to join a team of three intrepid CBC enthusiasts to venture down into the (mostly) frozen marsh and see what species lurked there. Apart from the resident dark-eyed juncos, American tree sparrows, downy, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers, winter wrens singing their heart out, and a lone hermit thrush who probably should have been elsewhere by now, we also saw a Cooper’s hawk and the only two sharp-shinned hawks reported on the Toronto count. Even in the depths of winter, on the greyest of grey days, this place teemed with life. Climbing over tree-trunks, fording rivers (full disclosure, it was a mostly-frozen creek), as we traversed the “magic marsh” and discovered a new, secret pocket of urban wilderness, I felt like a wild adventurer in my own city.
When I now drive along the overpass now, I tell anyone who will listen about the extraordinary wonders that dwell in the magic marsh beneath us! And you’ll be happy to know that the marsh is now forever immortalized as an eBird hotspot. (Alas, it only receives visitors—and checklists—annually, for the CBC, but maybe that’s for the best; with any luck, it will truly remain an untouched urban wilderness.)
The Christmas Bird Count is by far my favorite yearly ritual. It reminds me of the wonder of nature that is all around us, if only we take the time to look, and that we have so very much to be thankful for.
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