Today, 14 December 2009, begins the 110th Christmas Bird Count, scheduled every year between December 14 and January 5.

Each count is held in a 15-mile diameter circle during a single 24-hour period (night hours are for counting owls!) and though most count circles are in the U.S. there are also counts in Canada, Mexico, Central and South America.

Volunteers organize the routes so they don’t overlap, then tally the number of birds per species, weather conditions, number of observers, hours spent and miles traveled.  The statistics allow Audubon to compare year to year, correcting for differences in participation and coverage.  It’s the longest running wildlife census in the Western Hemisphere.

Though the count period begins today, most counts are scheduled on Saturdays and Sundays so there’s still plenty of time to sign up.  For instance, the counts near Pittsburgh will be:

• Beaver in Beaver County,  Sat 12/19/09
• Buffalo Creek in Washington County (IBA 80), Sun 12/20/09
• Buffalo Creek Valley in Butler & Armstrong Counties, Sat 12/19/09 (Yes, there are two big creeks named Buffalo in our area. Confusing!)
• Bushy Run park in Westmoreland County, Sat 12/19/09
• Butler in Butler, Lawrence and Mercer counties, Sat 12/19/09
• Pittsburgh in Allegheny County, Sat 12/26/09
• Pittsburgh South Hills in Allegheny and Washington Counties, Sat 12/19/09
• Rector in Westmoreland County, Sat 1/2/10
• Washington in Washington County, Sat 12/19/09

It’s easy to participate.  You can count in the field with other participants; go with friends or meet new ones assigned by the coordinator.  If you live in the count circle you can count the birds at your feeder.  Just contact the count coordinator and he or she will handle the rest.

For contact information on all the Pennsylvania Christmas Counts, click here and go to pages 6-8 of the Pennsylvania Society of Ornithology newsletter.  (The counts are listed by count name.)  For other locations, check the Audubon Christmas Bird Count website to find a count near you and contact information for the circle coordinator.

I’ll be participating in the Buffalo Creek count in Washington County (IBA 80) organized by Larry Helgerman on Dec 20th.

Pick a count.  Have fun!

(photo by Z Taylor, taken at a Pitt Sciences outing in 2006)

As I mentioned last month, winter’s a great time to study birds indoors. One skill I like to brush up on is my ability to identify birds by sound. It takes a while to learn this skill but it’s well worth the effort because you always hear more birds than you can find with binoculars.

Interested in learning? Here’s how.

First, get your hands on one or more of the many fine recordings specifically geared toward learning bird sounds. These come in many formats: CDs, iPod files, iPhone apps and web-based recordings. The best learning tools include audio explanations with each bird call.

Then, set aside some time to listen and learn at your own pace. You can learn indoors but you’ll need to practice in the field, too. Winter may seem like a bad time to do this but it’s great for learning the basic sounds of resident birds without the springtime confusion of all the birds singing at once.

The two instructional series I know best are the CDs I use myself: Peterson’s Birding by Ear and Lang Elliott’s Know Your Bird Sounds. Both cover the birds of eastern and central North America and include a booklet with the CD.

The Peterson series is good for spring and summer because it focuses on songs, the sound birds make during the breeding season. Species with similar songs are grouped together with tips to tell them apart so you can compare the sounds and identify them more readily in the field.

In winter like to use Lang Elliott’s Know Your Bird Sounds, pictured here, because it includes all the sounds each species makes, not only their songs but the sounds you’ll hear right now: contact calls, alarm calls and even the whistle of their wings (e.g. mourning doves). The booklet describes the basics of bird song and Lang Elliott’s soothing voice announces the bird, describes the type of call you’re about to hear and explains the situations in which the bird makes the sound.

Want to get started right away?  The Lang Elliott CDs are available on the Shop WQED website. Just click on the picture above and scroll down the page to purchase one or both CDs.

And remember, be patient as you learn. This skill will take years to perfect and even the best birders need to brush up on it. 

…In fact, I think I’ll go listen to my CDs.

(photos from Shop WQED’s Nature category)

Now that Halloween is over the holiday shopping season has officially begun.

If you’re like me you’re hard pressed for gift ideas for friends and family and you might, like me, have a hard time answering the question, “What do you want for Christmas?”

Fortunately I got a head start on this last summer when Robyn Martin of our ShopWQED department asked me to select nature-related books and gifts for the ShopWQED website.  She gave me a catalog to select from and urged me to suggest additional items that she could offer as well.

I circled my favorites, many of which I already own — I highly recommend Great Natural Areas of Western Pennsylvania and How Birds Migrate — and I added one of my favorite wildflower books.

Wildflowers of Pennsylvania by Mary Joy Haywood and Phyllis Testal Monk, is an illustrated guide to the wildflowers of the entire state.  Published in Pittsburgh in 2001, every flower is illustrated by a photograph contributed by members of the Botanical Society of Western Pennsylvania.   Those of you who know Esther Allen will find many of her photos inside.

I use Wildflowers of Pennsylvania as a resource when I blog about flowers and in the winter I browse through the photos and think about spring.  I’m glad we could offer this book online to a wider audience.

Take a look at the ShopWQED Nature section.  Maybe you’ll find some gift ideas.

p.s.  Click on the shopping bag above to see the entire website including Rick Sebak’s DVDs and Chris Fennimore’s cookbooks.

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Remember how I wrote that OnQ will feature Birding for Everyone this coming Monday? 

Well, I just found out Friday afternoon that I’ll be on that show – live! – to talk about birding and blogging.  So if you’re in the Pittsburgh area on Monday October 5 at 7:30pm, you can see me on WQED.

Unrelated to this but Very Cool:  Last night in the rain we watched hundreds and hundreds of chimney swifts circle and drop into the chimney of the Oliver Bathhouse on the South Side.  It was just like the Swifts movie.

29 September 2009

Last June I was privileged to go birding with John C. Robinson as he taught five children about birds.  The occasion for our outing was an OnQ segment about his book Birding For Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers.

Some of you may know John – he grew up in Pittsburgh.  He’s an excellent birder, has a natural ear for bird song and can identify all our birds by sound.  He’s also a great teacher and it shows when he’s with kids.

John stands out in the birding community for another reason and it began to trouble him.  John is African-American and is usually the only person of color he encounters while birding.  Why are there so few minorities involved in birding?  Why hasn’t this changed in the last 40 years when African-American and Hispanic involvement in other areas has increased?  Even more troubling, in a few decades this gap will affect U.S. attitudes toward the environment.  Minorities are a growing percentage of the U.S. population and the greater the percentage of people who know nothing about birds, the less care will be shown to them.

A few years ago John decided to do something about this.  More people needed to understand this gap as a problem, more people needed to encourage minorities to go birding, and young birders, no matter what their background, needed mentors.  And so John wrote Birding For Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers to urge us all to get involved.

Next week you can meet John Robinson and learn about his passion for birds and bird watching on OnQ, Monday October 5 at 7:30pm.  And you can buy his book here at ShopWQED.

(cover of Birding For Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers, courtesy, John C. Robinson)

p.s. See John C. Robinson tell his story at here on YouTube.

In America, everyone owns some of the most beautiful land this country has to offer.  It’s ours to enjoy at any time, without fences, without No Trespassing signs.  That land is in our national parks whose story will air on PBS beginning this Sunday, September 27 at 8:00pm in Ken Burns’ The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

Having just spent two weeks at Acadia National Park, I agree it’s one of America’s best.  I’m thankful that so much coastal property is open to everyone and that it retains its natural habitat and scenic beauty to this day. 

It might not have been that way.  Acadia was private land in 1901 when George B. Dorr and Charles W. Eliot were inspired to preserve it.  They and others formed the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations who assembled the land from private landholders big and small.  Soon it became clear that the only way to permanently protect the land was through national park status. George Dorr championed the cause and in 1916 presented 5,000 acres as a monument to the nation.  In 1919 it became our first national park east of the Mississippi.

Today Acadia covers 48,000 acres.  Though protected by law, the work is never done. If no one had followed in George Dorr’s footsteps Acadia would be in sad shape today, plagued by traffic jams, unusable trails and swaths of development on formerly scenic sites.  Fortunately, as Ken Burns points out, people are still “willing to devote themselves to save some precious portion of the land they love.”

Friends of Acadia (FOA) is one such group.  Formed in 1986 their mission today is to preserve, protect and promote stewardship of the park and its surrounding communities.  FOA has restored trails (shown here), worked with L.L. Bean to provide buses that reduce traffic congestion, provided education and stewardship programs and preserved land threatened by development.  My husband and I are so impressed by their work that we became Friends of Acadia members several years ago.

Throughout America people are devoting their time and energy to the national parks they love.  This land is your land, too.  Find out more on Sunday at 8:00pm.

(photo of Friends of Acadia trail crew building a bridge, courtesy Ian Marquis, Friends of Acadia)

Sorry for the late notice but I just found out that tomorrow is International Rock Flipping Day.

Founded in 2007 by Dave Bonta (from Plummer’s Hollow, Pennsylvania!), this will be the third year for people all over the world to take the time to flip a rock, record what they see and tell this year’s coordinator, Susanna Anderson the Wanderin’ Weeta blogger from British Columbia. 

I plan to participate but I can’t decide whether to flip a small rock in my city back yard (boring but quick) or go somewhere far away and turn over a big one (time consuming and potentially exciting).  My decision will be influenced by my earlier rock-flipping experience.

Years ago my husband and I took a 6-hour Reptiles and Amphibians class in which we watched a two-hour slideshow presentation, then went on an afternoon field trip.  The class was in the city, the field trip was in Elk County – timber rattlesnake country.  My husband has never been interested in nature classes but he did want to learn about snakes.

Before we began to flip rocks, Dr. Art Hulse explained it was very important to pull up the rock from its far edge so the rock shields your body from what’s underneath.  My husband is very near-sighted (he can’t drive or watch birds) so we were a team.  He pulled up the rock, I looked under it. 

On our first rock we found a ring-necked snake – harmless, kind of pretty and very stinky.  On our second rock we found something that was coiled in a circle and silently shaking its tail.  I called out, “It looks like a milk snake.”   Dr. Hulse said “Careful!  Hold on!” and came running with his snake handling stick.  He pinned the snake’s neck and held it up for all of us to see.  It was a baby timber rattlesnake, so young its rattler made no noise.  Half the class jumped back in fear.  The other half peered forward in fascination.

Since that day I have a motto for those who tell me they’re afraid of snakes, “If you don’t want to see snakes, don’t flip over rocks.”  I hope this doesn’t eliminate half of my reading audience from tomorrow’s activities. 

In any case, tomorrow’s the day.  The rules are simple.  Susanna describes them here.  Go flip a rock and send your findings to wanderinweeta@gmail.com

p.s. Remember!  Pull up the far edge of the rock and, please, carefully replace the rock without harming the creatures you found under it.

(International Rock Flipping Day logo via IRFD coordinator Susanna Anderson)