Every Christmas Day I set off with my binoculars to take part in a Yuletide tradition unknown to Australians.
It’s called the Christmas Bird Count and for more than a century it was been celebrated among birders in the United States with the same gusto which in other western countries is reserved for turkey and mince pies.
The count doesn’t actually have to take place on the big day. Any convenient date within the week of Christmas will do.
The Christmas holiday in the Christan calendar is largely about family, beyond celebrating the birth of the person after whom Christianity is named, and so the bird count is viewed as paying homage to the family of bird-watchers.
Perhaps the most famous tribe of birders in the US is the one found in the avian haven of Central Park in New York. I got to know the Central Park birding fraternity after I had been posted to New York in the early 1980s as a foreign correspondent covering the United Nations and I soon discovered the park, although centred in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, was rich in birds.
It was also rich in birders who soon took this newcomer under their collective wing.
I don’t know of any other country that has a Christmas bird count and how the tradition started in the US is an interesting story.
Prior to the turn of the 20th century, hunters engaged in a holiday tradition known as the Christmas “Side Hunt.” They would choose sides and go afield with their guns—whoever brought in the biggest pile of feathered (and furred) quarry won.
Conservation was just beginning in that era and bird-lovers were becoming concerned about the toll hunting was taking on bird populations. On Christmas day 1900, an early officer of the then-nascent Audubon Society, Frank Chapman, proposed a new holiday tradition – a Christmas bird “census” that would count birds during the holidays rather than hunt them.
Over 123 years, this count has now become a vital tool for conservation.
The data collected allows researchers, conservation biologists and wildlife agencies to assess the long-term health and status of bird populations across North America. When combined with other initiatives such as the Breeding Bird Survey, it provides a picture of how the continent’s bird populations have changed in time and space since 1900.
The long-term perspective helps develop strategies to protect birds and habitat, and identify environmental issues with implications for people, too.
In recent years the Christmas counts have informed Audubon Society studies on the decline of the once-common and familiar birds found in private gardens and city parks. Birds like the American robin, blue jay and bluebird have become rarer over the past 40 years – from about the same time I first went birding in Central Park.