Counting and Listing Birds

CBC - GBBC - magic birding acronyms - these are all about counting birds. One is formal and full of requirements: The CBC is the Christmas Bird Count, a program of the National Audubon Society. According to their website "it's an early-winter bird census." Volunteers are grouped into regions and count birds for 24 hours on Christmas Day.

The GBBC - aka the Great Backyard Bird Count - was last weekend. I'm writing about it instead of doing it because I was home in New Jersey for one of the days and then flew to Illinois to visit my mom and dad and some sibs for the rest of the weekend. Maybe next year...



White-winged crossbill male in our yard in March 2009

 I love birding - I'm a more-than-casual observer but less than "life list" maker. We have several bird identifying books:  National Audubon Socity Field Guide to North American Birds - Eastern Region groups the pictures of birds by their color of the bird. Our new book is our Sibley's: The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North American (called Sibley's because it is written and illustrated by David Allen Sibley).  We can refer to both for more information about behavior, calls, habitat, migration and identification.

I also bought two "cheat sheets," that is, Peterson Flash Guides, laminated multi-panel bird identifiers that sit all year on the small round table by the windows that look out on our bird feeders. One is more than 100 species of commonly seen birds along hiking trails of the Eastern U.S. The other is all the "day-flying birds of prey seen in North America."

My intention is to create a list of birds that we see regularly in our feeders and another list of birds we see regularly in the fields and forests around our house - like the white-winged crossbill (we saw the female too) in the picture. I wanted to prepare these lists BEFORE the GBBC but time got away from me and then, when I realized I wouldn't be able to participate anyway, it got put on the back burner (but not too far back).

Wait - I do have a "life list" that I started in 2007 - so maybe I am a life-lister after all. We've seen a great variety of birds, ducks and hawks either at home or on our trips. In 2010 we visited Barnegat Bay and Lighthouse State Park, Cape May Point State Park and Hawkwatch, The Wetlands Institute (Wildwood), Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge and Sandy Hook/Gateway National Recreation Area (all but Cape May were firsts).

(For me the bonus was that I got to see the Barnegat and Cape May lighthouses along the way. Now that's a life list I'll have to make: lighthouses I have seen. But that's another subject. We also saw Fort Hancock in the Sandy Hook/Gateway area - but that's another subject too.)