Audubon Christmas Bird Count: Why it's important and how you can join on Long Island

Benny Rivero scanned a tangle of underbrush at Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, looking for a fluttering movement or a flash of color. “There,” he said, pointing to a small slate-colored bird with a pale beak. “A dark-eyed junco.”

Benny, 13, and his friend Ben Chaikin, 12, from Huntington and Old Bethpage respectively, were tallying birds Saturday morning for the National Audubon Society’s 126th annual Christmas Bird Count. The birds their group spotted that day would be added to data collected from mid-December through early January across the Americas, from Baffin Island in the north to Paraguay in the south.

The count is one of the largest and longest-running participatory science projects in the world, according to the society. Created at a time when bird populations were declining drastically, the count is crucial, as the world's avian populations are once again at risk, experts say.

"It's extremely useful data when you're looking at large-scale, long-term population trends," said Kevin Munroe, the Long Island preserve director at The Nature Conservancy. "There is no other comparable data to that."  

Counting birds, not killing them

The once-yearly bird count was conceived to replace a bloodier tradition that had been popular in the late 19th century — the Christmas side hunt, an annual shooting competition in which the “side” that bagged the most animals, winged or earth-bound, won the day.

By the late 1800s, indiscriminate hunting of birds for food, sport and fashion had ravaged many bird populations. In 1900, the last wild passenger pigeon is said to have been shot, marking the effective extinction of a species that had once numbered in the billions.

That same year, ornithologist Frank Chapman suggested a Christmas count instead of a cull. Twenty-seven people joined the inaugural census.

Last year, more than 83,000 people in 21 countries participated in nearly 2,700 count “circles,” including about a dozen on Long Island. Together they counted more than 44 million birds of 2,503 species, according to the Audubon Society. 

At Sagamore Hill on Saturday, Benny and Ben participated in this year's count with their mothers, Sydney Chaikin and Christine Rivero, and Joyann Cirigliano, an ecologist at the nearby Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary, who kept the official tally. The group walked the paths along wooded areas and open fields bordered by bare trees — good vantage points for red-tailed hawks scanning the ground for small mammals. (The group spotted two.) 

The elder Chaikin said her son’s “spark bird” — the bird that sparked his interest in the hobby — was a roseate spoonbill he saw in Florida when he was 8. After that, she said, he spent hours reading bird guides.

Benny, meanwhile, got curious around 11, according to his mother, when his uncle took him birding in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, a verdant paradise for urban birds.

Both boys said they have compiled life lists — a list of every bird they've seen at least once — of more than 200 species.

On Saturday, Benny and Ben both added another “lifer”: a red-throated loon.

In 3½ hours, the group spotted 43 species, including common ones like blue jays, mallards and song sparrows, and less familiar ones: red-breasted merganser, golden-crowned kinglets, a yellow-bellied sapsucker and the loon.

“That’s a high bird diversity for a single site on Long Island in winter,” said Stephane Perreault, a naturalist at the Greentree Foundation in Manhasset, who helped compile the numbers, thanks to “the multiple high-quality habitats found at Sagamore Hill.”

The "most remarkable" land birds tallied there were three turkey vultures, Perreault said, which usually migrate south in winter.

Down by the shore, the group found four long-tailed ducks, which travel south from their summer nesting grounds in the Arctic; two hooded merganser, freshwater birds that “take temporary refuge in salt water until the local ponds thaw out,” Perreault said; and five sanderling, which he said are “an abundant winter beachgoer on the South Shore,” but are less common on the North.

Counting for conservation science

More than a century after the passenger pigeons were extinguished, birds are again in trouble. Three billion birds have disappeared from North America since 1970, according to a 2019 study. Millions every year are killed by cats — both owned and feral — and millions more die when they collide with windows. 

Development for housing, roads and industrial agriculture has replaced the landscapes they need to feed and nest. And the heating climate has stressed habitats and strained food supplies, leaving nearly two-thirds of North American bird species vulnerable to extinction, researchers from the Audubon Society found. Long Island natives like saltmarsh sparrows, piping plovers and wood thrushes are among them.

With so many at risk, the hundred-plus years of Christmas Bird Count data have been a bounty for ornithologists, offering insights on population trends and where and when birds are showing up. That’s especially critical information as warming drives species to more northern latitudes and higher elevations, according the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The data helps inform local conservation efforts too, Munroe said. He studies the local counts ”to help gauge how we are doing in managing our marshes and our meadows and our forests.”

“I look to see which of our marshes in the winter have Virginia rails and clapper rails and swamp sparrows and northern harriers," he added. "And I look to see if our meadows are supporting bluebirds and field sparrows and kestrels."

Along with the scientific value, Munroe said, the counts allow non-scientists to connect to nature “in really an almost intimately local way.”

“For one day, the parks, the paths, parks and ponds of your life, in your neighborhood, have national, even global significance,” he said. “Every time you raise your binoculars, every time you count a bird, you are participating in a 125-year international science experiment.”

Munroe said he was 12 when he joined the count for the first time in northern Virginia with his father — who, at 85, still counts birds every December. The younger Munroe recalls a feeling of weighty responsibility on those early missions — “the knowledge that, at that age, the National Audubon Society needed my help.”

At Sagamore, Ben expressed a similar sentiment: “I think it’s pretty cool that we’re part of something really big, something that helps birds everywhere."

Then he raised his binoculars, searching for more birds.