Christmas Bird Count & New Year Big Days

Dr Stephen Moss, Global Consultant, NETVUE Birdfy 

Christmas and New Year is traditionally a time for rest, recuperation, eating and drinking – but for birders like me, it is also time to get out in the field and count birds! 

As we reach the end of another year, and look forward to the start of a new one, you might think that birding would take a back seat. That’s especially because across the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, in much of the USA, Canada and where I live in the United Kingdom, the days are very short, with as little as seven or eight hours of daylight. Moreover, many of our most familiar birds – warblers, swallows, swifts, flycatchers and others – have long since headed south for the winter, and won’t return until the coming spring. 

Yet it seems that rather than putting us off, the need to pack as much birding into those brief winter days encourages us to try to see as many birds as we can. And nowhere is this more true than in North America, where tens of thousands of people take part in the longest-standing survey of birds anywhere in the world: the Christmas Bird Count.

THE CHRITMAS BIRD COUNT

On December 25, 1900, the first Christmas Day of the new century, 27 hardy Americans headed outdoors, many braving ice and snow, to look for birds. They were what we now call ‘birdwatchers’ – but it wasn’t until one year later, in 1901, that this word first appeared in print, as the title of a book by the British ornithologist Edmund Selous.

Whatever we call them, these pioneering men and women started something huge. The man behind the count, ornithologist Frank Chapman, published the results in his new magazine for the Audubon Society, Bird-Lore. This encouraged his readers to take part the following year, and by 1909 the annual count involved more than 200 participants, who together recorded a total of more than 150,000 individual birds. Four years later, in 1913, a team in California reached a special milestone: the first count over 100 species; while in 1939, 2000 observers recorded over two million individual birds.

Today, the annual Christmas Bird Count is a national institution. There are well over two thousand separate counts, with more than 70,000 participants, in every US state from Alaska to California and Hawaii to Florida – and elsewhere in the Americas too. On December 21, 2013, a count in Ecuador recorded a world record 531 species in a single day. Eight years earlier, on December 19, 2005, a count in Texas broke the US record, tallying 250 different species.

Participants, who must stay within a ‘count circle’ with a diameter of 15 miles (24 kilometres), and carry out the survey between December 14 and January 5, which allows flexibility, and avoids participants having to desert their family on Christmas Day itself!

They are allowed more or less any means of transport: they can drive, walk, run, or cycle – with some using helicopters, hovercrafts, horses and on one occasion, in North Carolina, taking to the air in a hang-glider. Although such stunts grab the headlines, and the count is very much a social event – though there’s nothing wrong with that – there is also a serious scientific purpose, enabling ornithologists to map the rise and decline, and changes in range and distribution, of different species over time, both in their own local area, and across the whole of North America and beyond. 

NEW YEAR ‘BIG DAYS’ 

In the United Kingdom, the Christmas Bird Count has never really taken hold. But we have our own tradition: the New Year ‘Big Day’, a pastime almost as old as the American version.

On January 1, 1905, a fifteen-year-old boy named Horace Alexander made a list of the birds he could see from the window of his home in Kent, south-east England. He tallied just 15 species, before adding two more – Eurasian Wren and Goldcrest – on a short afternoon walk before sunset, making a grand total of just 17. 

The following year, he and his older brother Christopher made more effort, and by walking around their local area recorded 33 species. In his seminal book, Seventy Years of Birdwatching, published in 1974, Horace recalled their rather leisurely approach:

 Though we did our best to get a good list, we did not go to the extreme lengths of rising before dawn and searching for owls, or continuing after dark. Indeed, for some years we did not even take a sandwich lunch out with us. Having eaten a normal family breakfast, we would set off soon after 9 a.m. and return home for lunch at one o’clock, with the possibility of going out again for a short walk before darkness fell.

A modest beginning, to be sure, but it laid the foundations for an extraordinary life and career as a birder. Known as ‘H.G.’ after his initials, Horace watched and wrote about birds, first in Britain and later in the USA, where he settled in Philadelphia. He died in 1989, at the age of 100; having seen birdwatching grow from an obscure and eccentric pastime to a worldwide, mass-participation hobby enjoyed by millions. 

Sadly his brother Cristopher’s life was cut cruelly short on October 4, 1917, when he was killed at the First World War battle of Passchendaele, aged just thirty. 

LISTING & MY BIG DAYS

Together, the Christmas Bird Count and H.G. Alexander’s ‘Big Day’ kick-started the modern obsession with listing the number of species we see – on a single day, in a calendar year, or during our whole lifetime. This soon grew in popularity, at first because it was an acceptable substitute for shooting and killing birds, but later because it channelled our competitive spirit as birders. 

‘Big Days’ may also take place at other times of year. In the Northern Hemisphere, they are especially popular in spring, when on a single day in early or mid-May the tally of species in Britain or North America can easily reach 100, and sometimes far beyond. My personal record was achieved back in 1994, when in a single day in the county of Norfolk our four-person team managed 150 species – having started at two a.m. and ending after dark, and driven well over 300 miles!

But my favourite day of the birding year is still January 1, when I usually spend the morning on my local patch – the ‘three rivers’ of the Brue, Parrett and Huntspill, on the Somerset coast near my home.

I get there before dawn – usually around 7.45 in the morning – and start at the medieval churchyard of West Huntspill, home to a roost of Grey Herons, Little and Cattle Egrets, which usually fly out just before sunrise at around 8 a.m.

The churchyard is also home to a colony of Rooks and Jackdaws, and both Great Spotted and Green Woodpeckers. There are several species of songbird, including tits and finches, while the European Robin and the Wren may already be in song, despite the chilly weather. There are often surprises: Peregrines have become much commoner in recent years – as they have in North America – and I sometimes see one flying overhead.

Depending on the tides – we have the second biggest tidal range in the world, after the Bay of Fundy in Canada – there may be waders on the foreshore. Redshank and Dunlin are the commonest, but Pied Avocets now winter here in large flocks, Lapwings pass overhead, and Curlews feed on the mud. 

Shelducks are numerous, as are Skylarks – uttering their characteristic call as they fly up from the damp grassy areas where they feed. I tramp around a very marshy area and sometimes flush Common and Jack Snipes – the latter fly only a few feet before landing, and never call. And a couple of years ago I managed to tally 63 species – including a rare visitor, the Kentish Plover, which has spent several winters here. 

This New Year’s Day I will be out again, whatever the weather, starting 2025 off the way I enjoy it most – watching birds!

Stephen’s latest book, The Starling: A Biography, is published in the UK by Square Peg (£14.99)