Tips: Feeder Watching for Christmas Bird Counts

One often overlooked way to participate in Christmas Bird Counts, is to sign up to count the birds that come to your yard and feeders for a couple of hours. Obviously this would only work if your house is in a count circle, see this map https://audubon.maps.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=ac275eeb01434cedb1c5dcd0fd3fc7b4 which shows all of the count circles.

For some people who want to participate but can't due to health or scheduling reasons, or simply find the prospect of going out for the whole day looking for birds they may have never seen before to be a bit daunting, this can be a great alternative. It's just your yard, for about two hours.

Some people ask if there is any value to just counting yard birds for only a couple of hours. The answer is a resounding yes! The idea behind the CBC is to count every bird in a 177 square mile circle, which is regrettably impossible, but the more people who are collecting data, the more of the circle gets covered. The presence of feeder counters means that field counters can work with slightly smaller territories by skipping the neighborhoods that have feeder counters, devoting time elsewhere. I would also add that neighborhoods are just another type of habitat that attracts certain types of birds, but many field counters don't like going into them for fear of looking creepy by driving slowly with binoculars. You can usually tell which counts didn't have feeder counters: low numbers of House Finches, Dark-eyed Junco, House Sparrows, ect.

To go over how to do it, basically you count every bird that you see on the count day for at least a couple of hours. However to avoid double counting birds, you will want to count using a few parameters. First, only include the highest amount per species that you saw at one time, so if you look out and there are three chickadees on the feeders and they fly away and later two come back, you can’t add any to your previous three. If on the other hand they fly away and four come in later, than you would add one to your three because you can physically see four chickadees. Something to remember here that might up your numbers: frequently when a flock birds come to a feeding station, they don’t all come in at once, so if you can see the bushes and trees in your yard, train your binoculars on them, the rest of the flock may be scattered all around your yard and are just coming by ones and twos.
Another thing that is important to remember, sexes don’t count for this, so if you see three male cardinals on your feeders and they fly away and then later four female cardinals fly in you can still only add one to your current three. The reason they are counted in this way, is to avoid giving a count bonus to bird species where the males and females differ (cardinals, finches, woodpeckers, some sparrows) over birds where they don’t differ (chickadees, blue jays, nuthatches, other sparrows). If you remember the cardinal example from earlier, if you switch those to chickadees, you would have no idea if the new ones coming in were males or females. By counting in this way, all of the birds are counted the same.
For a couple of ways to spice up your count a little bit, remember earlier when I said to look in the bushes and trees for more birds, well sometimes you can see other species as well; things like Carolina and Winter Wren, Brown Creeper, Yellow-rumped Warbler (or even other warblers) sometimes hang around flocks of chickadees for the flock protection but aren’t particularly interested in the seeds that are in bird feeders, so they forage in the in foliage until the chickadees are done and they all keep going. Watch for Cooper’s Hawks that may turn up, don’t forget to add them. If you happen to know about an owl that is in your neighborhood, stepping out before dawn or after dark and listening would be a great way to add him to your list and don't forget to add the time spent listening for owls.
Keep a camera handy, if you have a rare bird turn up at the feeder, then you will need to document it and that is much easier with a camera.

Posted on October 16, 2021 04:28 PM by neylon