It’s 5:15 on a snowy December morning. It’s dark, and very cold, but you can hear the soft hoo-hoo-ing of owls. Then, you see it glide across the starry sky and perch in a tree in front of you: the snow-dusted silhouette of a screech owl. It sounds like a scene only Hallmark holiday magic could pull off, and yet, this is the lived experience of Jay Manning, assistant director of conservation at the Norman Bird Sanctuary, when he goes owling on the morning of the Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count.
Manning, besides working at the Norman Bird Sanctuary and leading the organization’s Sunday morning guided bird walks, is also a section leader within a census circle of the Audubon’s annual Christmas Bird Count.
Now in its 125th year, the Christmas Bird Count is the nation’s longest-running citizen science project, and it is one that spans the Western hemisphere, with the census happening as far north as the Arctic Bay in Canada to as far south as the Drake Passage at the tip of South America. The census is classified as “citizen science” because it is made possible through the determination of ornithophiles – bird-loving people who do not necessarily have a degree in birds, in science, or higher education at all – counting every individual bird in every species seen or heard during the census period.
The census “started as a form of protest,” Manning explains. In the 1800s, hunters engaged in the holiday tradition of the Christmas “Side Hunt,” where they would go afield with their guns, and whoever brought in the biggest pile of feathered and furred prey won. Or, as Manning puts it: “kids would get guns for Christmas and blast everything that went by.” As the idea of conservation grew, birders and scientists were becoming concerned about the declining bird populations, and on Christmas Day, 1900, ornithologist Frank M. Chapman proposed a “Christmas Bird Census” to create a new holiday tradition – to count birds, rather than hunt them.
The bird count no longer happens all in one day, or all at the same time. Instead, the Christmas Bird Count runs about two weeks before Christmas through the week after New Year’s. This year, the census takes place from December 14 through January 5. To manage a hemisphere-wide census, the Audubon splits up the map into circles, 15 miles in diameter. Rhode Island has six census circles in total: Scituate; Providence – Urban; South Kingstown; Napatree, RI-CT-NY; Block Island, and Newport County-Westport. The center of the Newport County-Westport census circle is near the Tiverton-Little Compton border. Each circle is then broken up into various sectors. The Newport County-Westport circle has eight sectors, including Portsmouth, Sachuest Point, and Middletown, the latter of which Manning heads. Each circle gets a one-day period to conduct the census. December 14 is the day for the Newport County-Westport area.
Manning “inherited” the Middletown sector. He used to work for the RI Department of Environmental Management (RI DEM) in the office of Water Resources. Through the DEM softball team, he met the two men who had been previously running the Middletown sector. They lived in South County. Manning lived on the island. When he joined them for his first Christmas Bird Count in 1985, he had to show them all the best birding hotspots. Over the years, his DEM colleagues moved on, leaving Manning to lead the sector and participate in the citizen science project almost every year since.
Each year, the Christmas Bird Count for Manning and his team looks like nearly a twelve-hour day of birding. Participants in his sector will meet in front of his house at 5:15 in the morning to owl, a crucial but optional experience (not all can start their day so early and conduct science projects). Then, the owling team meets up with the rest of his crew near Portsmouth Middle School to go to Sisson and St. Marys Ponds to count Canada geese. They aim to get to the ponds just before daybreak to count the geese when they are asleep to obtain the most accurate count of the highly transient species – geese are very active during the day. During “great goose count,” as Manning blithely calls it, his team can count upwards of two thousand geese across the ponds, though usually those numbers clock in at a more manageable one thousand to thirteen hundred geese.
After the ponds, the group splits up to hit the hot spots within the sector territory – a typical practice for many groups participating in the Christmas Bird Count, though the sleeping goose technique might be a Manning specialty. When the two DEM men ran the sector, they would finish up in the swampy area behind the natural gas facility off of Mill Lane because they had, one year, seen a Virginia Rail. Having never seen nor heard that bird beyond their anecdote, Manning since refuses to go back bushwhacking and slogging through that area.
Equipped with years of experience and encyclopedic bird knowledge, Manning is ready with techniques like the great goose count to help ensure the integrity of the census. Birds can be highly transitory during the day – foraging for food, roosting, mating, migrating, etc. – and one of the most notorious transitory species (besides the geese) are crows. They love to roost upon the old churches in Newport, and Manning describes the scene by the waterfront as “Alfred Hitchcock-esque.” Because of their particular flighty nature, he refuses to let his team count crows before 9 a.m., and they will stop close to 1:30 p.m. when the crows resume activity to ensure they are not re-counting the same crows over and over again throughout the day.
The entire experience is “exponentially more intense than the Sunday bird walks” at the Norman Bird Sanctuary, he says. “For the Christmas Bird Count, you’re counting everything – how many chickens, how many starlings, etc., etc.” This is a huge citizen science project. Mistakes in the data, if every participant was careless, could have massive consequences. “Making sure you are accurate with every species you are identifying is imperative to protect the integrity of the census,” he asserts. The Audubon has other practices in place, like official rare bird forms and stressing photographic proof of rare birds, to help further protect the census. And, Manning adds, unlike the manicured paths at the Norman Bird Sanctuary, “you do some bushwhacking to get to the birds.” The count is physically and mentally exerting.
There is no way of getting around it: the Christmas Bird Count is a full day, and not all enthusiastic go-getters, scientific well-wishers, and amateur birders can take it. Manning sometimes uses the Sunday morning bird walks at the Sanctuary to scout out potential birders who might have what it takes to participate in the Christmas Bird Count. He remembers inviting one couple from his guided bird walks at the Sanctuary to participate in the Christmas Bird Count, and he watched them become “broken, just shattered” as the day went one. He never saw them again, he chuckles – especially not for another bird walk.
But participating in the citizen science project has its unique, beautiful upsides. There is a sense of accomplishment of being part of an ongoing science project that brings thousands of people together over the entire western hemisphere, and, as Manning points out, “you’re living the history of the day” by attentively experiencing every detail nature offers up for grabs. Manning’s team of Christmas birders is small – between eight and ten people, four of whom owl in the pre-dawn – but it has grown since his first bird count in ’85 when it was only himself and the two leaders from the DEM.
The information obtained each year from the Christmas Bird Count has had profound effects of our understanding of birds, biology, climate science, and environmental science. “We can use the data to document the expansion and contraction of [bird] ranges,” Manning explains. “Maybe 50 years ago, we didn’t get any red-bellied woodpeckers. Now, they are everywhere. Likewise, the meadowlarks have fallen off the face of the sector.” Looking at the census data and range maps online, you can see the march of the red-bellied woodpecker, expanding its range as far north as the mid-coast of Maine. That expansion has happened fast. That woodpecker had not been confirmed that it was breeding in Rhode Island until 1985.
The census data can also illustrate boom and bust cycles within a species. Manning gives the example of the Carolina wren. Rhode Island is at the top of this little bird’s range; the cold winters can wipe out the population. However, last year the area had a record number of Carolina wren, and as the winters continue to warm, we can see their population grow and their range expand. Hundreds of other studies have used the census data to make discovers about bird populations and the environment.
“Christmas Bird Count data does extend beyond population census,” says Manning. Not every discovery that uses the census data is focused on birds. When Manning was still working for the DEM, he and the Water Resources Department were struggling to determine why the waterways on Aquidneck Island were considered impaired for nutrients and polluted. Whenever the DEM took flyover images during the day of, for example, Sisson and St. Marys ponds, they saw maybe 100 geese out on the water – not enough to cause the levels of pollution the department was tracking. The Christmas Bird Count data, however, actually showed the thousands of geese the flyovers were missing, and the DEM could effectively change their water improvement plans to incorporate this information. The natural environment is intricately interconnected, and something as seemingly as specific as bird census data can be the key to understanding other parts of the natural world and improving human-environment interactions.
Those interested in taking part in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count can find more information and the census map here. For those who are not ready to level up their birding game but are still interested in the practice, Manning is hosting the last Sunday morning guided bird walk of the year on December 22, and the walks will begin again January 5 of the new year.