CBC 2020

I left my house at 4:30 am on Saturday morning heading for St. Marks NWR. Forty-four other Wakulla and Leon County birders were also getting ready or had already started to bird. They would walk or drive routes and use kayaks to explore the Wakulla and St. Marks Rivers. A boat would launch from the marina in St. Marks to work the nearshore waters of Apalachee Bay. The 82nd consecutive St. Marks Christmas Bird Count was getting underway.

A Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is a one-day, mid-winter census of all the birds that can be found within a 15-mile diameter circle. The St. Marks Count is centered on a spot across the river from the Town of St. Marks and covers Southeast Wakulla County as far West as Live Oak Island and up to Wakulla Springs. 

The first CBCs took place on Christmas Day in 1900. They were started to displace the tradition of Christmas Side Hunts in which people would shoot as many birds as they could find on Christmas Day.  Today, Counts are conducted worldwide and take place from mid-December to early January instead of just on Christmas Day. Over 2,500 Counts are held each year, staffed by almost 80,000 volunteer observers.

The first St. Marks Count was on December 22, 1939 at a time when Lighthouse Road and Mounds Pool were newly built and work on the levees was continuing. It was a good day for birding. The low overnight had been in the forties and the day’s high would not reach seventy. The sky was clear and there would be no rain. Larry Givens, the refuge manager, left the original Port Leon headquarters at 7:45 am and, with the help of two other US Fish & Wildlife Service employees, birded by car and boat until 6:00 pm counting 87 species including 5,760 Canada Geese, among which they found the state’s first recorded Greater White-fronted Goose. Because of Given’s dedication – he did the Count solo in 1943 and ’44 when the war stripped him of staff —   the St. Marks Christmas Bird Count has been held every year since.

CBCs are a cross between science and sport. As a scientific effort the data derived is not exact, but it does show broad changes in distributions and population numbers. You can read the St. Marks data over the years and see Canada Geese disappear by the early 1980s as the Southern limit of their wintering range shifts Northward. White-faced Ibis began to appear on the Count about twelve years ago as they expanded their range Eastward. You can see slow decreases in the number of birds over time due to pesticide use and habitat loss.

As a sport, there’s competition among the counts to get high species numbers and find rare birds. The St. Marks Count is among the elite national counts that regularly breaks the 150-species barrier and there is pressure to make sure it stays there. There are target birds and a concerted search for uncommon or rare species. Birders have found twenty-two species on the St. Marks Count that have only been recorded once, rarities like Tropical Kingbird and Lapland Longspur. This is serious competitive birding.

The St. Marks Count Circle is broken up into nine territories. Mine had nine birders, birding in ones and twos. Predawn we found owls and rails. After sunrise we counted shorebirds and ducks. We searched the woods for winter feeding flocks. We got our target birds; American Flamingo and Red-cockaded Woodpecker.

The Covid pandemic has brought changes this year, limiting teams to social pods or socially-distanced and face-masked birders.  The usual evening dinner at the Wakulla Springs Lodge to count up the day’s numbers and share news of rarities has been cancelled. Everyone will just send their information in by mail and email. Not as much fun and we’ll miss the stories.

Some counts, faced with the practical difficulties of the pandemic, have chosen to skip a year. The St. Marks Count, though, went forward. How could we let a pandemic stop us?

After all, Larry Givens didn’t let World War II stop him.