Season’s tweetings
By Michael Edwards
For the TODAY
As the vivid blues and greens of the Oregon Coast summer transition into the monochrome of autumn, a brilliant yellow songbird with a black head clamps its feet onto a suet feeder, gobbles a morsel of “Berry Blast'' and flies away.
Because of their vast range and mobility, monitoring populations of songbirds like the Townsend warbler requires dedicated teams of scientists and volunteers. Much of the bird population data that ornithologists use in their studies are obtained by citizen scientists participating in the annual Christmas Bird Count, or CBC.
The count started this year on Dec. 14, but data will be accepted from the public through Wednesday, Jan. 5.
Recently, a group of local volunteers counted birds visiting their home feeders while others ventured out into Lincoln City’s “Count Circle” and “phished” for birds. “Phishing” is a type of bird call used to attract songbirds. According to Joe Liebezeit, staff scientist and avian conservation manager at the Portland Audubon Society, there are thousands of count circles around the world and, like a puzzle, data from the various circles are combined to create a global picture of bird populations.
The Audubon method for counting birds requires volunteers to “Look for the maximum number of each species visible (or within earshot) at any one time. For instance, if you see five chickadees on your feeder at once, and a few minutes later a chickadee flies by after the five are gone, don’t add another to your count.”
Don’t worry, volunteers who double-count or under-count will not be banished from the Audubon Society or be forced to sell their binoculars on eBay to the lowest bidder. The CBC is a fun, community activity that is accessible to everyone.
In 1900, ornithologist Frank Chapman organized an alternative competition to the annual Christmas “side hunt” where Americans dressed up in their flannel and mukluks, ventured out into the cold countryside and shot as many birds as they could shoot without regard to species or whether the birds were going to end up on the dinner plate or not. Chapman saw these hunts as wasteful and instead, proposed keeping the competition aspect of the hunt while centering the new event on identifying rather than killing birds. The Christmas Bird Count was born, and that year, 27 counters in California, Toronto, Canada and the northeastern United States identified 90 different bird species.
For more than 120 years, ornithologists have used the information gathered by citizen scientists to draw trendlines to predict what the future holds for hundreds of different birds. The Audubon Society’s 2014 Climate Change Report is a comprehensive study that predicts how climate change could affect the ranges of 588 North American bird species. According to the report, which used CBC data, more than half of the bird species are decreasing. If the current warming trends continue, 314 species will lose more than 50 percent of their current climatic range by 2080. Despite the troubling trends, dawn villaescusa, the president of the Lincoln City and Tillamook Bay Audubon Society, gave an example of a local bird that is experiencing a population rebound.
During the warm and windy days of summer, snowy plovers lay their camouflaged eggs onto the beach at Sitka Sedge. This egg-laying strategy works well to protect future generations from predation by ravens and coyotes, but it is no defense against sand-rails or flip flop-shod feet. To protect the snowy plovers, the US Fish and Wildlife service limits access to the beach during the nesting season. Biologists place colored bands on the plovers’ legs to help them determine the locations of individual birds. Careful management of these shorebirds along the Oregon Coast has allowed them to rebound from a low of 50 individuals in 1990 to an estimated 468 birds in 2017.
Fortunately, when habitat for the snowy plover is protected, the positive impact of that protection extends to species like the semipalmated plover, a shorebird that shares the wrack line with its endangered cousin.
Citizens of Lincoln City and the Tillamook Bay area may not be able to impact bird population trends globally, but through participation in groups like the Audubon Society, they can, and do, contribute to the knowledge base that informs the scientists whose meticulous work is utilized by policy makers to protect wildlife habitat in our coastal communities.
For more information about joining the local Audubon Society Chapter and in participating in the Christmas Bird Count as a citizen scientist, go to lincolncityaudubon.org.
Bird checklists, binoculars and field guides are lent to those who sign up.
For more information about the data compiled by the CBC or the population trends of a specific bird species, go to audubon.org.