The sound of the loud outboard motor made its way towards calmer water in the Eastern Passage as four of us wearing binoculars voyaged in the rag top roof aluminum scow, or smallish type of flat bottom fishing boat. We’re a portion of the 15 dedicated Wrangellites searching for what feathered creatures were flying around.
It was part of the Audubon Society’s 125th annual Christmas Bird Count, which lasts for three weeks, from December to early January. This day was the first day of the count, December 14th.
“You can drive right by here and not see them if you’re not looking,” Dennis Strom, 80, said. He’s been birding since he was 12 years old. “If you’re looking for eagles, you won’t see them. You look for snowballs, and you’ll find them.”
He said a snowball is the white head of a bald eagle, like a white hat. Then, there’s the ducks. They range from a solo count to a raft – which is a significantly large number. They call it a raft because from a distance it looks like a raft floating.
“There’s times when you’ve got flocks of ducks from like that island there down to this corner,” Strom said. “You can sit for an hour trying to figure out how many there is. Then you just make an estimate.”
Strom said he’s worked on Wrangell’s Christmas Bird Count for about 10 to 15 years.
Once we reached an inlet, where the water was calm, the motor slowly gurgles. A couple of us saw a splash in the water.
“Just came up right there,” Strom said. “See he’s flying. It’s a goldeneye.”
That’s the barrows goldeneye, a sea duck. Strom worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for 30 years.
When he retired, he moved down to Wrangell from the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in western Alaska.
“We dealt a lot with doing research studies on birds out there,” Strom said. “We had summer groups who would come in. We’d supply the camps and run people out to the camps.”
He said over the years that he’s participated in the Christmas Bird Count, it’s really hard to tell if there’s been change as a birder.
“You have years that you’ll have a whole bunch more crows, and some of them, if you get a warm winter, you seem like you got a little bit more of different species,” Strom said. “Water birds are pretty stable. It’s the birds up on the up on the mainland here that you get some real variations in.”
He doesn’t just study birds for the Christmas Bird Count. He sees variety at his house too, where he maintains a bird feeder.
“I feed a two pound coffee can full of full of sunflower seeds every other day,” Strom said. “Okay, I saw a couple of ducks here when I was looking.”
More ducks, but also about six geese on the beach and a heap of mallards – close to 30 of them.
A flock of birds flew away, but not too far. Strom said he watches carefully what the birds do, so he doesn’t add the same birds to his count. They’re in the distance, but still in eye view.
“Give them a half hour, though,” he said. “They’ll be right back in this corner again.”
I ask, “This is their territory, then?”
“Well, it’s a good beach for them to spend time on,” Strom said. “They can feed on it, they’re out of the cold water. It’s a day that you want to be out sunning yourself when the sun comes up.”
He said there’s an abundance of eagles in Southeast Alaska, because of all the islands and fish in the area. Though, we didn’t see many. It’s kind of cold out and the sunshine was fleeting. Up ahead, there’s a grey lone duck on a log. I was proven wrong though, Strom said it’s a young glaucous gull.
“They change so much as they grow up,” he said. “They get a difference in size and the color that’s different. I’d call that a first year.”
Lauren Cusimano, the communications manager with Audubon Alaska, said they use data from the Christmas Bird Count and other counts to provide resources for communities, like the Migration Explorer, which is a tool that tracks birds’ migration.
Cusimano said the Christmas Bird Count is the most popular bird count that people participate in.
“Every Christmas, especially, every holiday season, every winter, 10s of 1000s of people go out to participate in the Christmas Bird Count across the hemisphere,” she said. “So that has, over time, generated 12 decades worth of data.”
She said this information notifies conservation biologists about what action is needed to protect specific species of birds on a global level. She said there are currently 300 scientific publications that have used the Christmas Bird Count data. They cover bird species diversity, population trends and habitat impacts.
Cusimano said, “It informs strategies to protect birds, their habitat, help identify environmental issues which also have major implications for humans as well.”
Cusimano said we’ve lost close to 3 billion bird species since 1970. The Christmas Bird Count, and others, are crucial in affecting environmental policy. One example is a research article that shows how drastic of a threat some bird species in North America face.
“Two-thirds of North American bird species are at risk of being extinct by the end of this century, like 75 years from now,” she said. “So there’s another example that we lean on quite heavily.”
The Christmas Bird Count began in 1900, with only 25 locations in the United States and Canada. Now, there are also counts in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands.
Cusimano said, “That makes it one of the longest running wildlife censuses, or counts, in the entire world.”
Cusimano said that last year they broke records in terms of participation and the amount of species.
She said they counted 83,186 participants and 40,871,030 birds. They’re still counting the data for this year – it can take a few weeks to get in.
“Just like our birds, participation also ebbs and flows,” Cusimano said. “Like very much a high participation year during 2020, but then it dips and wanes. But last year, people turned out and we did set records.”
Cusimano said last year 38 Alaskan communities participated. As counts trickle in this year from Alaskan communities, she has an idea of what to expect this year.
“I’m seeing the usual suspects, as far as species: marbled murrelets, bald eagles, our various land birds over in Southeast,” she said.Gulls and terns, I’m seeing the usual numbers.”
She said the Christmas Bird Count brings people together in the name of community science. It also introduces people to bird related events, like the Stikine River Birding Festival held in Wrangell during the spring.
Cusimano said that there’s always a chance to count birds, whether that’s through the eBird app or other counts like Climate Watch. That’s right after the Christmas Bird Count from January 15 to February 15.
As for the hyper-local data this year, Wrangellites counted a total of 46 bird species and 2637 individual birds. The most common were bald eagles, mallards and Barrow’s goldeneyes. The unusual birds that Wrangellites found were a few brown creepers, Anna’s hummingbirds and one barred owl.
