(A pair of Pine Grosbeaks were counted for the Christmas Bird Count in 2021. Photo: Colin Gerber)
The organizers for the Christmas Bird Count for Stittsville-Richmond-Munster are pleased to announce that the event is returning for its eighth year in our area on December 16th. They are looking for residents who are willing to spend a couple of hours during the day to count the number of birds at their backyard feeders. Field observers will also be covering the areas by foot and car to count birds during all hours (including owl counts in the dark).
You could contribute to North America’s longest-running community science project. Organizers are asking residents to let them know at least two days in advance (by the evening of Thursday, December 14) if a feeder-watcher is going to participate so that the field observers don’t double-count the birds in that immediate area.
Stittsville is just one of these counts. Volunteers walk or drive designated routes over the course of 24 hours while others keep watch over their bird feeders. Tobi Kiesewalter is again this year coordinating the field observers and feeder watchers in the Stittsville sector. He’ll make sure field observers stay away from the area around each participant’s house to ensure birds are not double-counted.
“Birds are excellent indicators of the health of our environment. The one-day count gives a great seasonal snapshot of bird distribution across the continent. The sheer numbers of volunteers and counts happening provides a massive amount of data that scientists can harvest to help determine environmental trends. Scientists have already used this 121-year old dataset to look at the effects of climate change, for example,” Tobi explains. “There’s probably less than 15 species of bird that feeder watchers in Stittsville will see in the winter so it’s easier to get involved.
In the annual count for 2022, 19,258 birds were identified in our area – a rise from 15,877 in 2020. If you have bird feeders up and you’re able to commit a few hours to watching them on December 16, please contact Tobi Kiesewalter (by the evening of December 14) at tobi.kiesewalter@gmail.com.