Christmas Bird Count, 2010

This morning at first light I went outside for firewood and heard the bell buoy in the harbour clang.  The swells must have been moving into the harbour ahead of tonight’s storm, which has rainfall and storm surge warnings posted, but the air was still, just as it was yesterday, the day of this year’s Nova Scotia bird count.

Yesterday was my first official participation in the count, something my older brother had suggested I might do when I talked to him on Friday night.  He is my one older brother (the other five are younger) and he has influenced my life in a number of ways besides getting me involved in the bird count. 

He is a statistician, still active in it even though he is retired from active teaching, which of course is a useful skill in the Bird Society, but he started out in university as a Math and Science student.  My highest marks in Provincials (my high official high school leaving grades) were in Geometry and Physics, and I think I won school prizes in both; my lowest by quite a long shot was English.  However, I had watched my brother’s study habits during his first couple of years as a university student and knew I would (or could) never work as hard as that, so I passed on Math and studied English instead.

I have been watching birds since I was about ten, when our dad pointed out to me an osprey hovering over the lagoon at North-side East Bay in Cape Breton.  I watched it dive straight into the water, struggle upwards with a fish in its talons, get enough height to shake the water out of its feathers, swoop up a little higher to shake again, and then fly away to its nest or a high perch to either eat the prey or feed its young.  After that I began to notice the eagles that circled over the big lake when my next younger brother and I would venture out there in the rowboat, and I’ve loved watching birds of all sizes and colours ever since. 

I think my older brother became a bird watcher later than I did because when we were talking about an eagle I had seen floating up the Shubenacadie River on a small ice floe, he didn’t remember the Bras d’Or Lakes eagles and ospreys I used to watch.  However, as a mathematics and statistics person, he became a much more careful and scientific watcher than I ever was, and it was he who often educated me about specific birds and their habits and songs.

On Saturday, the day before the count, Lorraine and I watched chickadees and juncos and jays on and under the feeder in the magnolia bush pecking at seeds and sometimes squabbling over them.  From where she sat she was able to see a male cardinal carefully approaching the feeding area under the bush (the jays are good at knocking seeds out of the feeder every time I fill it).  It was a great moment for me because I hadn’t seen a cardinal in the neighbourhood for almost a year, and I wished that I could do the count that day, as I could have included the cardinal, a couple of blue jays, and a pale goldfinch in its winter plumage.

We weren’t home much yesterday, but in the morning I refilled the feeders and in the afternoon I had a chance to watch for a while.  I saw my little crew of juncos working the territory accompanied by a couple of white-throated sparrows who are also regulars.  My happy handful of chickadees made a busy visit, but no goldfinch or blue jay to be seen, at least by me.  I was feeling tempted to bend the rules and report Saturday’s cardinal, but decided I couldn’t do it – something of that need for statistical accuracy kept me honest.

So I was delighted when the wary cardinal showed up and hopped across the snowy lawn for a quick feed and I added him to my brief list.  When I reported my stats to my brother last night, he told me that his group had observed thirty-eight species out at Cole Harbour, so I was happy for him, but I was also glad to have my numbers included in the total.   

The numbers may not have told anything of my delight at watching the birds, the poetry of their quick presences, but they did put our house and local birds into the record books for the 2010 bird count:

Dark-eyed junco                    10
White-throated sparrow       4
Black-capped chickadee        4
Northern cardinal (male)      1