Area birding enthusiasts are encouraging residents to keep their birdfeeders filled to entice their feathered friends to venture out for the Christmas bird count. Courtesy photo

The annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is the oldest and largest citizen science event in the world. For over 100 years, people have gathered during the winter holiday season to count birds. 

In the process, the CBC has created a valuable source of information on the status and distribution of early winter bird populations that is studied by scientists and interested people everywhere.

The first CBC was led by Fred Chapman in 1900. He and a small group of birders changed the course of bird conservation in the United States forever. At that time, the "side hunt" was a Christmas Day custom in which teams competed to see which one could shoot the most birds and small mammals in a single day. The CBC offered an alternative outing – to identify, count and record as many birds as possible on Christmas Day.

Over 100 years later, the CBC has grown into something that those first Christmas Day birders could never have imagined.  The CBC is now an international event with 2,052 separate groups participating last year. They identified, counted and recorded 69,354,406 birds. 

Today, the CBC can be completed during any 24-hour period between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5.

Each CBC team is assigned a 15-mile diameter circle, an area of about 177 square miles. Boerne's is centered at the Interstate 10 Waring exit and this includes all of the city of Boerne. The Boerne count is led by Sue Wiedenfeld. She and her team will be out Saturday, Dec. 29, and they can use our help.

Sue asked me to spread the word to everyone living in a house near a road, "Please keep your bird feeders filled from at least a week before Christmas through the end of the year. This will concentrate the birds near you, so the birders making their survey as they drive along the road can see and count the seed-eating birds on your place.

Last year's Boerne CBC had 17 volunteer birders, who searched for birds a total of 67 hours on their count day. They found 104 different species including 1,208 chipping sparrows and 1,518 robins. Notable or unusual bird species in last year's Boerne count were a black phoebe and a palm warbler.

I recently looked at the Boerne data, and three species stand out as new to this area and now well established. The Boerne CBC has been done annually since 1975 and from 1975 to 1985, no white- winged doves were seen here. White-wing doves appeared for the first time in the 1986 CBC with two individuals counted. Since 1997, they have been counted in the hundreds every year.

Another interesting new bird population that is now common in our area is the black-bellied whistling duck. This bird first appeared on our CBC in 1996 when 80 were counted. They have been increasing since then with 95 or more counted here in each of the last 10 years. Last year there were 156; the year before 443 were counted and the year before that 271.

Although not as numerous as the white-winged dove or the black-bellied whistling duck, the crested caracara appears to be another species that is newly established in our area. A single crested caracara was first counted here on the 1992 CBC; one or two have been identified in six of the last 10 years. As a predator, this bird is never found in the numbers of the other two and in recent years we also have observed this bird nesting here during the summer months as well.

All the CBC data is collected, tabulated and analyzed by the Audubon Society, and anyone can view it online at their excellent Web site, www.audubon.org/bird/cbc. Check it out. They also offer a beautiful photo gallery of birds spotted in various CBC counts, annual CBC summaries and articles on what we are learning from the bird count data.