Ken was looking forward to a relaxing weekend that involved watching the Idaho State Bengals play in the 1981 NCAA Division I-AA football championship game. I convinced him to watch and count birds instead. He has never forgiven me. The day was cold and cloudy and the birds were few and far between, and darn it if the Bengals didn’t win the championship!! Thank goodness for DVR technology! 39 years later and we are still participating in CBCs!
Jay, thanks for sharing some highlights. I wasn’t there to participate, and appreciate knowing what you found.
Thanks to all who were out there looking! Some of my best birding times were CBCs in Anchorage, AK many years and several when I first moved to Boise and needed to learn the local birds.
Participating in a CBC is a great way to learn, practice, and share birding skills and knowledge.
I don’t think I ever set foot in Venango. I was a volunteer at Hawk Mt. Sanctuary for most of the 1990s and ran two North American Breeding Bird Survey routes in Pennsylvania (LIttle Marsh in Tioga and Potter counties was always fun; lots of species).
I mentioned last night the 1981 count, my first. I’m attaching a scan of the page with our count, as published in American Birds – no kids, not on papyrus, but close 🙂
Seeing how the birds (and birders) have changed is one of the great appeals of our Christmas Bird Count, both from a scientific and more global perspective, but also from a personal and very specific perspective.
Jumping out at me beyond our 67 species were the count-week-but-not-count-day species : Pied-billed Grebe, Wood Duck, Ruddy Duck, and Mourning Dove.
Boise’s CBC was held today in a mix of very foggy (~1/3 to 1/2 of the circle?) to beautiful sunny weather. A number of misses but some great finds. Thanks a ton to everyone who participated, and to the many folks to who helped coordinate!
Preliminary totals:
participants: ~80
species: 104 on count day, plus 6 count week species that had been seen Thurs-Sat but not today
Highlights:
Trumpeter Swan (a 1st) – western greenbelt & ponds on N side
RB Merganser (only a handful of years) – Barber Park
Osprey (~7th time)
Greater Yellowlegs (2nd time?)
2 Spotted Sandpipers (only a handful of years)
Long-eared Owl (1st time?) – high in foothills
2 Bushtits (2nd time?) – on Joplin rd across from SW corner of storage facility
Ovenbird (!!; 2nd time in a row) – private residence, can’t be seen from street
I don’t know the address but knowing the CBC zone it was in, it can’t be more than ~2 miles from the bird we hosted last winter … same bird or serious coincidence??
Western Tanager (1st time) – Barber Park
Lincoln’s Sparrow (~4th time) – canal W of Borah Park
good variety of finches – Red Crossbill, Pine Grosbeak, and Evening Grosbeak
count week species: Lesser Scaup, Barred Owl, Lesser Black-backed and Herring Gulls, Blue Jay, Harris’s Sparrow
Misses (mainly due to fog or access):
blackbirds (too foggy to see main roost in gravel pits) – Yellow-headed, Brewer’s, and BH Cowbird
One of my best birding memories is having a Goshawk dive on me from her nest
high in an Eastern White Pine in 1998 at Nescopeck State Park, Pennsylvania.
Alan Gregory
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Alan C Gregory Lt. Col., USAF, Ret. Mountain Home, ID Air Force Public Affairs Alumni Association, life member Member, North American Butterfly Association
While conducting our Winter Raptor Survey between Wendell and Hagerman yesterday, we veered off the path to see if we could relocate the COLO. We spotted a large grey raptor with a black and white facial pattern that flew up into a Russian-olive. It was near the river and not in the South Hills. I took photos and called it a lingering Osprey. After submitting raptor route data and information about our Osprey sighting to Jeff Fleischer, he responded.
“You’ve got a Northern Goshawk, not an Osprey.” I have corrected my ebird report. I wish all of you who subscribe to ebird alerts were not privy to this embarrassing mistake. Alas, mea culpa.
Sarah
Home of Idaho Birding and the Idaho Bird Records Committee
