Christmas Bird Count 2011

Yesterday I spent most of the day out with other local birders counting many many birds as part of the Fremont Christmas Bird Count, an annual bird count run on a international scale by the National Audubon Society.

The basic premis is there is a large circle of land with the center in Fremont, a group of people gets together around Christmas each year to try and count as many birds in that circle as they can in one day. This is done each year for the same area so that we can see how the area is being used by birds across time and what is here during the winter months.

I've been helping out with the Fremont CBC for many years....probably since I was....12 or so. Anyway it's a lot of fun and I always go along with Tom Kashmer to survey the area around Green Creek. This year Kim and Kenn Kaufman and Randy Kreager also joined our group as we tackled our 'piece of the CBC pie'

we had a lot of fun, it was quite chilly but the wind was minimal so we bundled up and out we went. Our part of the CBC pie goes out into the bay, so we got to count ducks, lots and lots of ducks (ended up with over 24,000 for the day!). We also counted other birds, including Yellow-rumped Warblers, Blue Jays, robins, Bald Eagles and many more. Best of all I got to spend the day with some of my favorite people in the NW ohio birding community, which was quite refreshing since I haven't seen much of them lately.

I was SO happy to not be in the car, since graduation I've put almost 3000 miles on my car, that's 3000 miles in about 20 days and I was quite sick of it. Or really just sick of the fact that I hadn't been able to do other things, like actually use my legs. Well we hiked over 7 miles yesterday and my legs were quite happy :)

Plus at the end of the day we broke the previous record for number of species for our count, which is super exciting!!

You can't really see it in my crappy cell phone camera picture, but there are LOTS of ducks out on the bay

Kim and Randy checking out the ducks through a scope on a homemade 'tripod' (Kim's invention)

Kim and Tom walking down the dike counting birds, these two have had a HUGE impact on my life, especially as it relates to birds, spending the day with them was AWESOME