Bemidji Bird Enthusiasts Take Part In National Christmas Bird Count

Bird enthusiasts in Bemidji recently participated in the national Christmas Bird Count. It’s an annual effort to count birds to provide bird population data for conservation biologists.

The annual Christmas Bird Count has been going on for more than 40 years in Bemidji. The bird count is a census that is used for bird conservation. Volunteers met early Saturday morning at the Minnesota Nice Café and split into groups of three. The aim is to gather data on birds and species of birds seen within a seven-and-a-half mile radius or a 15-mile diameter circle around the city.

“It’s one of the longest running bird conservation data sets on species numbers overall and how bird populations are doing,” said Jaime Thibodeaux, who serves on the Mississippi Headwaters Audubon Society Board of Directors. “And it’s been used to track not only bird population, but how bird population are doing as relates to climate change and other changes seen within the environment.”

The idea to count birds across the world came from an Audubon group in New England in the 1900s. It originated as an effort to protect birds.

“Replacing a tradition of these hunts called ‘side hunts,’ they were hunts to recreationally hunt birds and someone came up with the tradition of counting them instead,” Thibodeaux said.

This year, participants in the Christmas Bird Counts didn’t see any many birds as last year. They say the cold weather and the limited open water played a factor in the decrease of birds.

“Mainly what we’ve been seeing are the chickadees, nuthatches, blue jays, a few finches, a lot of the birds that would normally be here in winter, like winter finches, have stayed up in Canada this year because there was an abundant corn crop in the Boreal Forest of Canada. So, it’s been a kind of a tough year to find birds in the winter,” said Doug Johnson, a participant of the Christmas Bird count.

There were 26 species in total counted and two new birds were recorded for the count, the red-winged blackbird and a brown thrasher. The Christmas Bird count is the longest running citizen science survey in the world.