There are piles of gear all over our living room that have nothing to do with seasonal gifts. Today, we are prepping for two bird counts down at the coast.  Jeff and I will be part of the national Christmas Bird Count, finding and tallying as many kinds of birds as possible in a single day on an assigned territory. It’s a census, but of birds, not people.

On my packing list are three categories. First, layers of clothes for every kind of weather. Sometimes there’s a 40 mile-per-hour wind and rain, other years we need long sleeves and neck gaiters to protect us from sun and sand gnats. Jeff and I will throw a huge duffel jammed with every kind of outdoor clothing in the back of our truck, so we can peel off or add on as needed.

Next, I’ve got a stack of bird books, binoculars, spotting scope, lists, maps, and complicated paperwork to fill out should we see a rare species. This year I’ve added my new Crossley ID Guide to Eastern Birds to the indispensable Sibley guide and my favorite shorebird book.

Finally, food. We are packing a cooler with pimento cheese, crackers, hummos, cut up carrot sticks, boiled eggs, apples, fig newtons and chocolate, as well as a thermos of hot, milky tea.  Calories substitute for sleep on the Christmas Bird Count. We will start canvassing our territory at 5:30 AM tomorrow morning at the latest, listening for owls, American woodcocks and whip-poor-wills.  We will keep looking and counting until dark.  If we do well, we may be able to report as many as 85 or more different species.

I took part in my first Christmas Bird Count with Bob Knight and Susie Wineriter in 1976, in South Carolina’s Aiken State Park.  All I remember from that long ago day are garlands of American robins in the trees and something like frostbite on my feet.

The territories I now count at Cape San Blas and St. Vincent Island were inherited from my awesome mentor, Barbara Stedman.  In 2009, when I met Barbara, a petite, supremely business-like birder, she’d already been keeping tabs along this stretch of North Florida coast for more than 30 years. It’s a good thing that Barbara and thousands of other citizen scientists have been watching. Their data shows us since 1967 absolute numbers of common birds have steeply declined.  Some species of nosedived as much as 80% including the northern bobwhite (quail). Many–like evening grosbeaks, meadowlarks, and several kinds of duck–have lost 50 to 70% of their population, in just four decades.

It’s difficult to advocate for something if you don’t know how it is faring, so for the love of the birds, we’ll be counting them.

I’ll keep you posted!

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