The 121st Annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count kicks off Monday and runs through January 5/NPS, Rodney Cammauf

Anhingas at Everglades National Park, yellow-rumped warblers at Yosemite National Park, and Snowy owls at both Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras national seashores. Tallying those, and hundreds of other bird species, resumes in earnest Monday and continues through early January as the 121st Audubon Christmas Bird Count brings thousands of birders to national parks and other landscapes to see what they can spot.

Armed with binoculars, spotting scopes, cameras, and notepads, and assisted by experts who immediately can tell the difference between a Western tanager and a goldfinch, or between a Downy woodpecker and its Hairy cousin, devoted birders across the hemisphere will be heading to plots with a 15-mile radius over the next three weeks to see what they can see.

Ironically, this celebration of birds actually evolved from an annual hunt to see how many birds could be killed over a certain time period.

"During the 1800s there was a holiday tradition called the 'Side Hunt' where people would choose sides and hunt, and whoever brought in the biggest pile of feathered and furred quarry won the Side Hunt for that year," Geoff LeBaron, who long has overseen the Christmas Bird Count for the National Audubon Society, explained during a conversation for National Parks Traveler's podcast for December 13. "It was probably started as a way of supplying fare for the holiday meal."

But at the end of the 19th centurn and early in the 20th century there was "a growing awareness of the need for conservation, that wildlife was not the unlimited resource that people had been thinking it was," he added. "And the millinery trade, the taking of birds for women's hats and fashion, was decimating colonial nesting waterbirds, especially herons, and egrets, and also some of the seabirds like terns."

Those practices led Frank Chapman, a New Yorker who was an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, to speak out against the Side Hunt. Chapman happened to be in a unique position, as he had his own publication, Bird Lore, to promote his call for turning bird hunters into bird counters.

"He proposed to his readers that people go out that upcoming season, for Christmas Day of 1900, and do a Christmas bird census rather than a Christmas bird hunt," LeBaron said. "That season there were 27 people in 25 different locations across the continent that went out and actually counted birds on Christmas Day rather than shooting them. One of the amazing things that Frank Chapman did along with just proposing the census rather than the hunt was he also decided that people should keep track of the amount of effort, the time and distance that they expended to count the birds that they did."

Dusky Grouse, Grand Teton National Park/Rebecca Latson file

From Hunting To Counting Birds

Chapman's proposition caught on, and down through the decades people turned out around the year-end holidays to see how many bird species they could spot in their areas, and also estimate the numbers they saw.

"So from the 27 people in 25 locations that first year, last season we had 2,650 different Christmas bird counts across the hemisphere" and more than 82,000 birders participating, said LeBaron. "It's now in every state in the United States, including Hawaii. It's in every province in Canada. We've counts in Bermuda, throughout the Caribbean, throughout Latin America. It's become a real holiday tradition for just about everybody that does it."

With many people today tired and even depressed from the coronavirus pandemic and the restrictions to normal life it's brought, the annual bird count offers a chance to re-energize with a fun outdoor activity.

"I think birding has kept many of us who are birders somewhat sane since March," said LeBaron. "Birds have this amazing ability to just engage a human's imagination and joy. They fly, they sing, they're pretty. Some of them undertake these incredible migrations that just seem almost impossible for them to be able to do physiologically.

"But the other thing about birds that's really, really cool is just about any human on the face of this Earth could go outside, right now today, and find a bird," he added. "Literally, if you're on the ocean, if you're in the desert, if you're in the mountains, if you're in a city, anywhere you go outside at this point, or even look out your window, you're likely to be able to see or at least hear a bird.

"They're available, they're in our yards. And they really have the ability to engage us in becoming aware and caring for conservation."

Bald eagle, Katmai National Park/Rebecca Latson file

But the counting of birds is for more than getting you outside. The data collected over the past 12 decades enables scientists, and even home birders, to track not just the numbers of species and individuals but also trends in terms of where birds are showing up, and how many.

"We've computerized the entire 100-year database. It's in Audubon's Christmas Bird Count database," said LeBaron. "When I first started (in 1987), there was a real reluctance by researchers to utilize the Christmas Bird Count, or other community science datasets."

There were concerns, he explained, over how reliable the data were because of year-to-year changes in weather that could affect both birds and bird watchers, as well as the expertise of the birders.

"But the beauty of the Christmas Bird Count is that even though the people in Boston are different from the people in Miami, it's the same people in each area that are doing it in the same way at the same time of year and exactly the same routes every year," said LeBaron. "So there's a real consistency over time within each circle."

Climate Monitors

Along with tracking birds they see, the observers also note weather conditions, and so the database is a good tracker of climatic changes. In recent decades the data has highlighted a shift in winter -- "the early winter is moderating on a sort of a continental basis," said LeBaron -- and some species also have shifted their locations.

"Very clearly there were over 200 species that have shifted their range as much as 200 miles northward, and also inland away from the coast," he said. "So by looking at the Christmas Bird Count, we could actually document how species are shifting their ranges in a moderating winter climate."

With that data in hand, Audubon's researchers have been modeling where they expect birds to show up, or move to, in the years ahead.

"The CBC actually enabled us to start to do that modeling and predict how things are likely to be changing and what people might be able to do to actually help address that," said LeBaron.

As an example of how the data is dissected, he said it's shown that robins and bluebirds "are actually shifting their ranges and actually increasing on the Christmas Bird Count. We're also starting to see an increasing number of the neotropical migrant species, the birds that are supposed to be in Latin America and the Caribbean for the winter, that are beginning to linger in small numbers on Christmas bird counts in the mainland of North America. That's definitely a pattern that's starting to happen. But other species are fading northward or fading out for reasons that are somewhat unknown."

Great blue heron, Olympic National Park/Rebecca Latson file

By their movement, and even their numbers, bird species are a key indicator of how climate change is affecting the planet.

"Birds are definitely the proverbial canary in the coal mine. They're a wonderful indicator of the quality of the environment that we all exist in. So if birds are not doing well, the chances are pretty good that all of us are not going to do very well," LeBaron said. "One of the groups of birds that we're most worried about right now are what's called the aerial insectivores, the ones that catch insects on the wing. There's a big discussion about the insect apocalypse in Europe, where something like 70 percent of the volume, biomass of insects, has declined in the last couple of decades.

"That's tremendously affecting species like swallows and nightjars and things like that. Their whole life cycle is based on catching insects on the wing. And if those insects are tanking, these birds have evolved to consume flying insects, so that they don't really have the physiological ability to shift their diet to something else. They're one of the three groups of species globally, that are declining the most."

Another concern, he said, is that the warming climate could force bird species out of their natural habitats. As an example, he pointed to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

"We're already seeing tremendous changes and what's happening to birds and other wildlife in the Arctic. You know, people talk about the polar bears, but what people don't necessarily think about are mountaintop species, the birds that are in the tundra environments on a continental landmass at the top of the mountains," said LeBaron. "Rocky Mountain National Park is one of the places. The Rosy Finch, it's a species that's almost entirely endemic to Colorado, at least as a breeder. They do breed in very northern New Mexico, and then they also move south a little bit. But it's a bird that basically needs the edges of snowfields in the tundra regions of the high Rockies. And there are other species of Rosy Finch, the Black Rosy-Finch, and a Gray crowned Rosy-Finch. These species are specifically adapted to that environment. It's a very narrow niche that they have in their needs.

"What's happening of course, as things are moving, as things are warming, the biomes, the habitats are creeping up the mountains. It will probably come to the time when the tops of the mountains in Rocky Mountain National Park aren't tundra anymore. And once you're at the top and your habitat disappears, there's no place to go."

Best National Park For Birders

When pressed on which national park he would visit if expense were no impediment during the Christmas Bird Count, LeBaron struggled to name just one.

"I think it depends on what you want to see because there are so many absolutely fabulous places in the park system. If you want waterbirds, go to Everglades National Park. Actually one of the cool things about South Florida is that the birds are breeding down there potentially during the Christmas Bird Count period, so it's a different flavor than if you went to Yellowstone or Denali or Acadia," he said. "Each park has its own host of species that are really wonderful and interesting and engaging. I think there's probably a group of birders out there that is trying to tick off their favorite birds in every park."

The annual bird counts have taken on increased importance in recent years, as scientists have noted the loss of roughly 3 billion birds during the past five decades.

"I think it's becoming increasingly important in that respect," said LeBaron. "In the 33 years that I've been in charge of the Christmas Bird Count, the total number of birds tallied has been dramatically declining even though the effort and the area of coverage has dramatically increased."

Going back to 1987, when he became director of the Christmas Bird Count, LeBaron said it was routine for the event to count between 75 million and 100 million birds every year. Last year, though, the tally only reached a bit more than 42 million birds. 

The paper that stated 3 billion birds have been lost over the past 50 years did not break those birds down by species, something LeBaron believes Audubon's data can document.

"With the Christmas Bird Count, we can do that. And this is one of the things that we're very interested in doing," he said. "We should be able to document if it's an across-the-board decline, or if there are certain groups of birds that are tallied on the Christmas Bird Counts that are ones that are the primary cause of those declines in numbers."

Traveler postscript: Check your favorite park's website to see if, and when, they are participating in the Christmas Bird Count.

You can listen to Traveler's entire interview with Geoff LeBaron in Episode 96 airing Sunday at 8 a.m. Eastern, 7 a.m Central, 6 a.m. Mountain, and 5 a.m. Pacific.