Counting Christmas Birds
The quick sharp days of late December found us counting Christmas birds near Saint Joe Bay in the panhandle of Florida. On Eglin Air Force Base, a stretch of property at the crook of the Cape San Blas Road, we scanned for a scissor-tailed flycatcher or a gray kingbird on the powerlines.
But what we really needed to find were the 70 plus regulars that overwinter on our long-held bird-counting territory. Committing to a Christmas Bird count means you sacrifice family/holiday time and slog through whatever rain, fog, mud and cold that late December offers. I love it.
The guard at the gate cautioned us about snakes. “With this weather being so strange,” he said, “They’ll be hanging out on the unpaved roads. Also, watch out for the 13-foot alligator at the edge of the marsh.“ He kept sidling his eyes at us, curious to know which wild thing would worry us. “Oh, and a really big black bear has been turning over trash cans.”
But he couldn’t tell us about the birds: that was our job. That was our concern.
On the Base (one of only two undeveloped properties left on the once lovely Cape), we searched for loggerhead shrikes on fence lines, Eastern meadowlarks in the closely cropped fields, Wilson’s snipe in a certain pocket wetland, and Nelson’s sharp-tailed sparrows in the black-needle rushes. Of the four, for the first time, we located only that sparrow.
The task of the Christmas Bird Count is not to explain why we are losing birds, but to create a baseline of how they are doing.
Still it’s hard to ignore why numbers of wild birds consistently slide downward when you revisit a few square miles of landscape year after year, and you know where the kinds of birds should be.
We see precise patches of lost habitat, like the stretch of lightly spaced/pines in Salinas Park that was so fruitful for American robins, Northern flickers and Eastern bluebirds, now converted to pickle ball courts and playground.
Lost habitat like the blunt, heavily eroded tip of Cape San Blas, once a favored resting place of a thousand or more wintering shore and seabirds.
And we don’t even bother to cruise the private subdivisions where years back, the headlights of our truck would catch the red eyes of a nighthawk. That bird would be a wonderful find. But its habitat has been replaced with 3000-square-foot beach houses and private pools, edged with sod.
I love that our back-to-back counts take us to St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge the day after the Cape every year.
We drive from the west end of the island to the east, aiming to be at Tahiti Beach at or before sunrise. Being at that time and place is a spiritual experience, even if the sun is swathed like cotton candy, in fog.
Over the years, super birders have helped us round out our territory list; for the last two it’s been the phenomenal Eliza Hawkins. She’s tough and smart and tireless. We talked of our longtime companion on this count, Grayal Farr, who is gravely ill, and wished he’d been there to find the requisite merlin.
There is a certain sawgrass slough on the south side of Road G, which winds along the lagoon side of the island. There, we know to slow way down, quietly, quietly, so we can peer between the palms into the tannic water, trying not to startle the blue- and green-winged teal we hope have returned. And yes, there they are: eight and five, respectively. How do they do that? How does this handful of teal know to return from Canadian breeding grounds to just this tannic swamp?
They are not just numbers on our list but lovely, gliding silent beings. Before fear drives them deeper into the watery forest, the light catches the chalky-blue patches on the blue-wing, and the ghostly gray and brown feathered green-wing females, each with a flash of brilliant emerald on the flank. For a brief moment, I look into their eyes, wild and wary, and feel a deep kinship of place.
That’s what the last days of late December were like for me, hoping to find the birds I know in the places where they consistently return. Bearing witness, being present, that’s what the Christmas Bird Counts means to me.
Thank you for being faithful in the face of fewer birds. And oh that teal! Such shimmering.
Such incredible photography. Thank you for this report from the heart, Susan.