Auduboners organizing Christmas Bird Count

The birdwatching social event of the season will kick off this week, set on different days in different localities so birders can get involved with more than one group for the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count.

Results from more than 2,000 counts across North American and beyond are expected to take place this season, enabling Audubon and other conservationists to assess the population status of both resident and migratory birds across the Western Hemisphere. The count also helps assess the state of the habitat that is critical to bird species.

Dozens of groups are being organized in the Inland Northwest alone. Each group counts for one day between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5 in a designated circle 15 miles in diameter.

The count began on Christmas 1900 in 25 eastern localities where birding groups publicized the pleasure of identifying, counting and recording all the birds they saw.

Apart from its main attraction as a social and competitive event, the databases generated by online reporting have boosted the Christmas count’s value in generating a “snapshot” and monitoring the long-term status of resident and migratory birds across the Western Hemisphere, National Audubon officers say.

The data reported by volunteers are combined with more scientific survey methods to help ornithologists study myriad issues, such as the magnitude of West Nile virus.

Impacts of the 2005 hurricane season were documented last season, when more than 57,000 volunteers tallied 62 million birds by covering a record 2,060 counting areas.

Storms dramatically altered where birds were found around the continent. Some western birds, such as Franklin’s Gulls, Townsend’s Solitaires, and Western warblers and tanagers, displaced to Atlantic Canada by hurricanes, were seen moving back southward through the Eastern states, Audubon officials said.

Idahoans have been participating since 1914, when the state’s first Christmas Bird Count was organized in Moscow, said Shirley Sturts of Audubon’s Coeur d’Alene chapter.

New birders are always welcome to join the counts, said Alan McCoy, the local chapter coordinator of groups that will be heading out on Dec. 30 for the Spokane count.

“What we see depends on the year and the weather,” said Jerry Cline, who works at the Little Pend Oreille National Wildlife Refuge. Cline has coordinated two counts in recent years, one in Colville and one at the refuge.

Local count coordinators enter their survey data into Audubon’s Web site, where computer systems almost instantly compile results for comparison to past years.