Bonne Bay -
You don't have to be an ornithologist to take part in the biggest bird count in North America.
Anita Best of Norris Point has been bird watching for about 30 years, and is again looking forward to this year's Christmas Bird Count, and challenging her avian know-how.
"I really enjoy keeping a bird list and looking at birds," Best said. "You don't know what's going to turn up. I always try to learn more trying to tell the different seabirds apart. That's very hard, but when I'm successful in telling one gull from another, I feel like I've accomplished something wonderful."
This year marks the 110th Christmas Bird Count. In Canada, counts are co-ordinated by Bird Studies Canada for the National Audubon Society, the overall co-ordinator of the event.
The Christmas Bird Count started on Dec. 14 and will continue until Jan. 5, and tens of thousands of volunteers, like Best, will participate. Best will be watching birds visit her birdfeeder and document what she sees throughout the day.
"You feel like you're a part of a group all going out on that same day, looking and counting, that's kind of interesting," said Best.
Darroch Whitaker has been a monitoring ecologist with Parks Canada for the past two years. This is his third Christmas Bird Count in the Gros Morne area.
"Every Christmas Bird Count, they have what they call a count circle, which is a circle with a radius of 12 kilometres centred usually on a town. There are quite a few in Newfoundland and Labrador, at least 10 that are run each year," said Whitaker.
He said every year on the designated count day for a circle, anyone who is interested in counting can go out and participate.
"The point is to try and count as many birds as you can in that circle. We try to avoid having people double counting birds, we try to divide it up so this person has this section and that person has that area so you're not overlapping in the areas you're searching."
He said some areas in counting circles are inaccessible, such as the top of Gros Morne Mountain due to ice and snow, but the point is to search as much of an area as possible and count what birds they encounter.
"It's to get the flavour of what birds are around that year," he said.
"You go out for the entire day and usually it's a pretty fun day. A lot of people, who usually don't go birding as much during the year, go out with someone who has more experience and spends a day or part of a day out looking for birds. Or if you just want to stay at home and watch your birdfeeder, basically there are all kinds of ways you can contribute."
The data from the Audubon Society is processed and publicly available on their website.
From year to year or decade to decade, large-scale and long-term trends can be monitored in bird populations. Whitaker said there are more than 2,000 Christmas Bird Counts that take place in North America every year.
In the Gros Morne area, Bonne Bay had its count on Thursday and St. Pauls on Saturday. Residents in the Corner Brook area will be out looking at the skies on Jan. 2.
"You don't want to have them all in one day because you might have a limited pool of birdwatchers who would like to take part in several different counts, and that way you can share your effort around with the different counts," said Whitaker.
Lois Bateman is the count co-ordinator for the Corner Brook Christmas Bird Count. She said last year, Corner Brook saw about 4,800 birds with a total of 41 different species and 46 official counters.
In her more than 20 years of co-ordinating the Christmas tradition, Bateman said she has seen some species come and go depending on climate, weather and general resources.
"We have both the dump and the harbour in our area. Up at the dump we tend to get eagles and ravens and several kinds of gulls. Down around the harbour, we get gulls and a few kinds of ducks sometimes the odd vagrant coming in from the ocean. In the woods and at bird feeders, we get blue jays, two kinds of chickadees, woodpeckers, sparrows, doves and pigeons," said Bateman.
The Corner Brook count circle is centred on the Ballam Bridge, said Bateman.
"It includes the whole city of Corner Brook plus a bunch of the outlying areas," she said.
Bateman said there are certain species of winter birds that weather in Corner Brook now which never did before.
"We tend to see American Gold Finches more in the winter than we did say 15, 20 years ago. We also see a fluctuation of some of the birds that come to the feeders. They're known as irruptive. They follow the seed crops on the spruce and fir cones.
If there's a good seed crop in Labrador they might not come here," she said.
Whitaker, who co-ordinates the counts in the St. Pauls and Bonne Bay areas, collects the data from participants and submits it online.
"You still want to try to make sure the data is reliable," he said. "If you're not particularly sure about the birds that are in your area, you should try to go out with someone who knows a bit about them. One of the great things that you can do these days is bring your digital camera along and get a little bit of video with sound on it. Usually you can show that to someone who knows their birds and they can tell you what that bird was."
Whitaker said about 30 people participate in the count, usually seeing about 30 to 40 species of birds with a total count of about 1,000 birds in the Gros Morne area.
"They've been doing the count in the area here for about 30 years. If you look back through the counts over time, you can see some real trends in the bird communities that are here. Some things have moved in for feeders like Mourning Doves and Gold Finches never used to be here but now are quite regular.
"You get to see some really interesting local trends, but the real power of this survey is it's done all over the continent ... it's sort of a snapshot every year of the distribution of winter birds all across the continent. From a bird population monitoring point of view, this is one of the most powerful tools we have for knowing what's going on with birds in North America," said Whitaker.
