Humans are hardwired to seek, to identify and to collect. For most of our history, our very survival depended on hunting things — nuts, berries, game — and doing it well.
The era of the hunter gatherers is behind us. But, every December, teams of seekers convene around the world to put that impulse to another use: the annual Christmas Bird Count.
“I tell people if you were into Pokémon as a kid, you should get into birding!” Sofia Bautista said with a laugh at one of the first Central Texas bird counts of the season.
Bautista and several others gathered at the Hornsby Bend Bird Observatory on Saturday to conduct the count, the longest running citizen science project in the country and one of the longest running in the world, according to the Audubon Society.
The Christmas Bird Count helps track population trends
During a bird count, volunteers return to the same area every year to conduct a point in time census, recording the number and variety of birds they can find and identify.
The bird counts started in 1900 as the conservationists’ answer to an earlier tradition, the Christmas bird hunt. During the hunts, participants counted not how many birds they found, but how many they killed.
John Bloomfield, the board president of Travis Audubon, said there are all sorts of apps and new technologies that now help people track bird populations. But the data collected during these annual counts remains an important resource.
“You can look at [bird population] trends over a long period of time,” he said. “So it's very valuable from that standpoint.”
Those trends paint a troubling picture. Bloomfield said bird counts, when combined and counted together, show “about 30% of the total bird life has been lost since the 1970s” in North America.
The reasons vary, though most are human caused and could be mitigated through changes in human behavior.
They include habitat destruction, pollution, collisions with buildings and cars, cat attacks and climate change.
Locally, birders believe extreme weather has recently taken a toll.
“I’d definitely say that the [2021] winter storm that we had here, that definitely knocked down some species for a few years,” said Vincent O’Brien, who organized the Hornsby Bend count.
Bird counting with your ears
During bird counts, participants don’t just look for birds, they listen.
“I'd say the large majority of birds [I find] when I walk through the woods are just heard only,” said Caleb Helsel at the Hornsby Bend count.
Helsel, a senior at Westlake High School, is known in the group for his ear.
He said he got a lot of practice identifying birds at Hornsby Bend during the early days of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I asked my parents to drop me off here on Saturdays,” he said “I’d get picked up again once I'd seen a hundred species. So I just walked around the whole property.”
As if on cue, he called the group’s attention to a faint sound a few minutes later, an Osprey flying off in the distance that they soon also identified with binoculars.
Other species spotted on Saturday included a caracara, a great horned owl, and a loggerhead shrike, also known as a “butcher bird,” for its practice of impaling its prey on thorns or barbed wire to store for later consumption.
Many participants also enjoyed finding more easy-to-spot species.
“Honestly, my favorite bird is the great tailed grackle, even though they’re super common,” Bautista said. “So, that was the highlight for me.”
Christmas bird counts take place between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5. You can find a list of Bird Counts happening in Central Texas and how to participate on the Houston Audubon website.
