I Don't Count (Don't Ask Me)

Lately, I have found I can no longer do on my computer the things I was doing just fine before. This is not so much because of any infirmity on my part but because these websites have tech people and I am convinced these tech people must change things in order to keep their jobs.

So now instead of signing into one of my emails with a password I have to click more buttons in order to do so. The way I used to print was changed after the last alleged upgrade. When I downloaded a document as a pdf recently I got a pdf.aspx I couldn't open without a "third-party program." I had to look up how to change it back to a pdf so I could print it.

None of this has saved me any time or made my use of the computer any easier. I didn't ask for these changes, they were foisted upon me.

Not using eBird. (RE Berg-Andersson)

In the name of security, several sites I've signed into for years recently asked me to create a new password. I get it, people can hack into your computer if they get your password, although some disagree how often these passwords have to be changed. I disagree, too, considering the several data breaches that affected me within the last year that did not involve these websites forcing the new password.

So I am more than a little disappointed the good people behind the Great Backyard Bird Count, held every year during the Presidents' Day weekend, have made filing my bird lists more high-tech and less user-friendly. The organizations involved include the Cornell Ornithology Lab (creator of the Merlin app I use), Birds Canada and the national Audubon Society.

In the past I could go to a dedicated site, sign in and then attempt to go through the steps to post the number of birds I saw, where, under what conditions, what day and what time. 

That has changed. 

There is still a dedicated site, www.birdcount.org. But now to report you must use either the Merlin app, the eBird Mobile app or send the information to the eBird website. For this I would have to create an account.

I have no interest in creating an eBird account because I don't care to use eBird to list my sightings. Sure, I look at the eBird lists to see what others have found in particular areas, including my home county. But when you file to eBird it is expected you will keep a COUNT of how many birds you've seen every time you go out birding.

Still not using eBird. (RE Berg-Andersson)

When I am out in the field, with binoculars around my neck, a stick in one hand and the Merlin recording app in the other, it is hard enough just finding a bird by eye or ear without taking the extra step and counting.

Say I see a couple of titmice as I walk in one direction and I then see a couple of titmice on the way back - have I seen the same two or four?

Say I am by a frozen pond where the one bit of open water contains what looks like hundreds of Canada geese (plus others - as I saw several winters ago). These geese aren't sitting still waiting to be counted. Most people reporting huge numbers are estimating, and while they are counting and estimating they are missing other birds flying or swimming around.

I support what Cornell and the others are doing. The Great Backyard Bird Count helps scientists understand bird populations and their health by collecting data on bird sightings from participants around the world. This information is very important for monitoring changes in bird species and their habitats, especially as the environmental changes - the climate change the Trump administration considers a hoax. (More on that in a separate blog post.)

And I can understand why you have to post with Merlin and eBird. Cornell runs Merlin and eBird. It built the infrastructure. Why create a separate site when you have already spent a lot of time and money on a technology platform that can entice more birders into creating more accounts to post their findings?

A cardinal, one of the many nice birds I've seen in the last few days 
without reporting to eBird. (Margo D. Beller)

Why? Because some of us would rather concentrate on birding than keeping count and filing electronic paperwork. 

Obviously, I'm no "citizen scientist." I'm just a backyard birder.

So, for what it is worth, here is what I saw or heard in the area of my backyard between Feb. 12 and today, Feb. 14, 2026, with help from Merlin:

Fish crow, American crows, mourning doves, a ton of juncos, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpecker, a red-bellied woodpecker, jay, too many house finches, two female and one male purple finch, male red-breasted nuthatch, titmice, starlings, grackle, robins, mockingbird, two white-breasted nuthatches, a pair of cardinals. 

Not bad, for winter.

Canary In A Coal Mine

There are things we see every day and take for granted. Birds, for instance. 

When I was growing up not far from the southern Brooklyn shore, I did not pay much attention to the birds. There were "sparrows," "pigeons" and "seagulls." In my immediate area the "park" was a large, concrete area with swings, basketball hoops, benches and a wall for playing handball. There was no greenery beyond some trees. My house had a postage stamp-sized backyard just big enough for some rose bushes, hydrangeas and small bit of grass.

A part of the Brooklyn shore I didn't appreciate when
I was growing up in the area. (RE Berg-Andersson)

Luckily for me, I could walk the quarter-mile or so under a highway underpass to the bay. If I wanted to walk farther, I'd go to Plumb Beach and look at the Atlantic Ocean. At the time this beach was dirty and not really a place to go alone, especially at night. (Now it is part of the Gateway National Park system.) At the time I lived here I did not appreciate the variety of habitats and birds available to me, if only my second-generation American parents had had more of an interest in things beyond making a living to raise their family.

I now know the presence of birds can tell you a lot about an area. So can their absence.

At the time I grew up there my neighborhood was mainly white. Several miles down Nostrand Ave. an apartment complex was decidedly not mainly white. I don't know if it had a park, concrete or otherwise.

What prompts these thoughts is an article the New York Times reported in November about a study by Nature Human Behavior, published online in September. The Times put on a headline that seems rather silly considering the content of the report, but it would be the type of thing to appeal to its upscale (or wannabe upscale) audience: "Why Warblers Flock To Tonier Neighborhoods."

I don't know why there was a two-month lag between study and article, and I did not care to set up an account to read the full Times article. But I did read a similar article in Mongabay.com, where the headline took the report much more seriously:

Discriminatory U.S. housing policies still affect bird sightings 90 years later

In a way, this should be obvious. In the areas where nonwhite people had to live because of the institutionalized banking process known as redlining, parks were not a high priority. 

From the report:

Historic segregation and inequality are critical to understanding modern environmental conditions. Race-based zoning policies, such as redlining in the United States during the 1930s, are associated with racial inequity and adverse multigenerational socioeconomic levels in income and education, and disparate environmental characteristics including tree canopy cover across urban neighbourhoods. 

Here we quantify the association between redlining and bird biodiversity sampling density and completeness—two critical metrics of biodiversity knowledge—across 195 cities in the United States. We show that historically redlined neighbourhoods remain the most undersampled urban areas for bird biodiversity today, potentially impacting conservation priorities and propagating urban environmental inequities. 

The disparity in sampling across redlined neighbourhood grades increased by 35.6% over the past 20 years. We identify specific urban areas in need of increased bird biodiversity sampling and discuss possible strategies for reducing uncertainty and increasing equity of sampling of biodiversity in urban areas. Our findings highlight how human behaviour and past social, economic and political conditions not just segregate our built environment but may also leave a lasting mark on the digital information we have about urban biodiversity.

Here's another reason this should be obvious. When the Cornell Ornithology Lab and the Audubon Society urge "citizen scientists" to report what they are seeing in their hikes and at their feeders, either through the eBird database or for the annual Christmas Bird Count (which has a fee) or the Presidents Day weekend Great Backyard Bird Count (which doesn't), the majority of participants are people who live near parks or have backyards where they can hang feeders. In a gritty urban neighborhood, feeding birds may not be the highest priority when there are so many other things you must do to survive when money is tight. 

The people who DO report are generally people like me: white, older, with enough money to buy a house with some land in an area near a variety of habitats suitable for hiking, fishing and, if we have an interest in it, looking for birds. To draw these birds to us, we hang feeders filled with various types of seed or suet. It has only been in recent years that a serious effort has been made to encourage nonwhite people to get involved with birding specifically and nature in general.

From the Mongabay article:

“We’re starting to untangle the environmental effects, because segregation did not just shape where highways and wastewater facilities were built,” said [study] lead author Diego Ellis-Soto, an ecologist at Yale University, “but also where national parks and urban recreation areas were built.” Those green spaces, he noted, attract wildlife.

Is it any wonder historic birding references are written by mainly wealthy white men and lack data from redlined neighborhoods? In a way it is similar to why women have suffered because research into such things as cardiovascular disease has centered on men, thus ignoring how women react in similar circumstances.

Redlining was officially outlawed in 1968, although some would say the practice continues in a less obvious way.

As I said, in many urban neighborhoods I know a "park" is a concrete playground with basketball courts, maybe a few benches and a swing or slide for the smaller children. There are exceptions, of course. In the planned neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens, the small houses were built in the English style, with a common, shared backyard that provides some needed space and a chance for neighbors to get together. (This area has become a preserved neighborhood to save it from being razed for more high-rise buildings.)

Most of New York is considered a concrete jungle, even though it contains Central [Manhattan], Prospect [Brooklyn] and Van Cortlandt [Bronx] parks, among others.  

But the majority of my home borough hasn't had farms or other large swaths of open space for centuries, not since Brooklyn was "developed" to handle the Manhattanites and others seeking to escape for more space. The people living near Prospect Park in Park Slope, along the near parts of Eastern Parkway and in Windsor Terrace spend a lot of money to live near this park, considered by landlords an offered "amenity." Maybe that will change in more of the nonwhite neighborhoods as they become "gentrified" by an influx of younger, richer, whiter people who demand more parks (and whose higher rents force out others, perpetuating the cycle).

You could say the absence of birds - whether through climate change or redlining - is like the canary in a coal mine, telling us things we might not want to know but ignore at our peril.

 

Count Me Out This Year

The morning after the storm
(Margo D. Beller)

This is the 3-day Presidents Day weekend, and that is when the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Ornithology Lab hold the annual Great Backyard Bird Count. It is meant to encourage people to really look at the birds around them and note how many they are seeing. The data gives the scientists information as to what kinds of birds are increasing in numbers, which are declining and where this is happening.

Most birders enjoy the Count and the counting. They like being "citizen scientists" and use the Count as an excuse to go visit as many places as they can (almost like a winter World Series of Birding), see as many birds as they can and then file their reports. I've done that. But I've also written of how I don't like to count because it makes the birding more like work. 

Well, this year, for the first time in many years, I am not participating in the Count. Why? I'll count out the reasons:

1. I forgot it was going on until late Saturday, about midway through the Friday through Monday period.

2. Because of the 2 feet-plus of snow we've had since early this month I can't walk that easily in the places where I usually look for birds. It's costly to send out a plow crew for a town or county with limited manpower and budget. That's why, for instance, at Greystone, the county park near me, only the main road and some of the paved paths are plowed. The unpaved back areas where I would find all sorts of birds, even in winter, are blocked by piled-up snow mountains.

In another area I hike, Patriots Path, I discovered I could walk in one area but only because some sort of heavy vehicle had driven through, pushing down the snow under heavy treads that helped make walking with my stick a tad easier. But other areas of this linear park were not done, I found. I don't walk in deep or uneven snow anymore. The effort is hard on my lungs and using the stick to keep my balance is hard on my arms and neck.

There was a time when I would joyfully walk in deep snow. Falling into a drift and needing my stick to help get me off my back and on my feet was fun then. It's scarier now. I might not make it back up.

Shoveling the front path, again
(Margo D. Beller)

3. There have not been as many birds at my feeders lately. I thought it was my fault. During autumn there were times I left the feeders inside because of the rain or took them in before dark to keep them from bears. Birds go where there is food. If no food is out they go elsewhere and might not be back.

Before the Feb. 1 nor'easter I made sure the three seed feeders and the suet feeder were filled and outside. After the storm ended I used my shovel and my feet to tamp down a walkable path to the two poles so I could brush the white stuff off the feeders and unblock their openings.

I was sure the snow would bring the birds back in greater numbers than I've seen. Maybe they left for less-snowy areas. Maybe the storms killed them. Or maybe there are more birds visiting than I think. I would not know because...

4. I don't have as much time to spend watching. That might seem strange considering during this time of coronavirus I am working at home, but that is the point. I am in my upstairs office working. I can't sit on my porch all day and wait for the birds, especially when it's quite cold outside. I no longer walk to the train and see or hear birds in my neighborhood in the morning. I no longer look out the train window and see a redtail hawk sitting atop a tree in the sunshine, or the ducks in a Meadowlands impoundment. Now I get up, spend a little time on my porch or in the kitchen and then must get to work.

The birds are on the periphery. I get my breakfast and from the kitchen table I see a male downy woodpecker at the suet, or house finches taking seeds. I sit on the porch in the early morning with my first cup of coffee and see a female cardinal, maybe a titmouse. I hear the churring of a redbellied woodpecker. But I can't stay out there. If I am lucky I can look out the open shade in my office and maybe see a chickadee in the locust tree, or I can hear honking Canada geese as I take a walk at dusk around the block.

And finally...

(RE Berg-Andersson)

5. I just don't feel like it. I have been under a lot of stress. The virus has kept me from traveling, from seeing friends and family. My work has become harder and more tiring, and with no commute I don't have any of the down time where my brain could relax. I go from one job (where I make money to pay the bills) to another (taking care of MH and the household chores). That is why this year, even more so than usual, watching for birds and counting them seems more like work. After being cooped up in the house for five days, on the weekends my inclination is to flee, not sit in the house and wait for anything to come to the feeders. But this weather makes fleeing that much more difficult, and that depresses me. 

That's what nearly a year of pandemic life has done to me.

I wish the snow was gone so I could take longer walks in different places and see more birds. But not now. That will have to wait until the spring.

Backyard Bird Census

Every year, the Cornell Ornithology Lab in New York and the national Audubon Society hold a Great Backyard Bird Count during the Presidents Day weekend. As the name implies, the idea is to encourage people to go outside or watch bird feeders and count how many of which types of birds show up.

White-throated sparrow (Margo D. Beller)

It is a chance for non-scientific types such as me to collect data that help the real scientists track movements of birds around the world and see which types of birds are on the increase and which are declining.

For me, it is a chance to do a census of which birds are in or calling near my house.

I am not a counter most of the time. It is enough to put "titmouse" in my notes rather than "3 titmice seen between 9 am and 9:15am." But I try to do this for the count at least one day during the four (Friday through Monday) days it's held.

I've already learned a few interesting things:

So far I've seen a marked decrease in the number of house sparrows. This could be for any number of reasons. It could be they are going to other feeders where people are using cheap millet seed these sparrows can more easily eat rather than the sunflower seeds I use, which they would have to crack open. It could be because there is a large number of house finches in the yard (I saw as many as nine at one time, all over both feeders). With all that competition there could be less incentive for the sparrows to hang around. (Although they will nest in anything including street lamps and under a window air conditioner. I know of one large sparrow flock using a row of forsythia on one street I walk on my way to the post office.)

Jay (Margo D. Beller)

I have seen no more than one or two blue jays at a time. There was a point a few weeks ago when there were as many as six taking turns hitting the house feeder, making it swing violently as they took off. Jays, like other birds, have a pecking order and if a jay comes out of turn it is swiftly forced off by another. Were those other jays just passing through?

I have seen or heard no Carolina wrens from my yard lately. These little brown and gold-fronted birds are the only wrens that will hang around my part of the country during winter - as long as they can find food. I know in past counts I've found at least one. There was one I heard during a hike and one calling quite some distance from my house one morning a few weeks ago. I am hoping the recent polar vortex didn't affect the wren population.

I have seen no juncos in the yard lately. That is another bird that will be out of the yard for weeks but then suddenly shows up in small numbers. However, the number of white-throated sparrows has remained fairly steady. Usually there is at least one I see or hear. Yesterday there were five, most of them checking for dropped seed bits under the feeder. When winter starts they tend to stay in the bushes but as the cold wears on they become a lot less shy. For instance, there is one that has made it his business to fly into the house feeder and eat there. It will not leave for the house finches and reluctantly leaves for the bigger cardinals and jays. As the winter goes on the male's white throat and the white "eyebrows" and yellow near the eyes will get so bright they can be easily seen in the dusk. This is the white-throat's breeding colors. Although white-throats have been known to remain in the New York metro area (in such places as Central Park, for instance), most will fly off to their northern breeding territories as spring approaches.

Red-headed woodpecker, North Carolina
(RE Berg-Andersson)

There is always a chance something unusual will be around to count. One year during the count, walking along a part of Patriots Path, I encountered a redheaded woodpecker, a southern bird that has been slowly moving north in its range as climate change makes the world warmer. For the redheaded, the challenge is finding the dead trees it needs for roosting. When I found it, it was noisily flying around one that was surrounded by water, just like its usual swamp (caused by the nearby Whippany River flooding). At the time, the sighting was unusual enough for my report to be questioned by the scientists, but I convinced them of my accuracy. Now, however, these birds have been found more often in New Jersey, with a confirmed nest in the dead trees of Troy Meadows.

I doubt one will show up in my yard this year but, given the increasing warmth of the world and destruction of its usual habitat through so-called development, next year is always a possibility.

Backyard Feeder Drama

This weekend has not only been Presidents Day weekend and Valentine's Day weekend but the weekend of the Great Backyard Bird Count run by, among others, the Audubon Society and Cornell. These counts are useful as a way of getting the average person as well as the avid birdwatcher involved in reporting what they see and how many, which helps the scientists get an idea of what species are increasing and which are on the decline.

Adult sharp-shinned hawk with prey in hole (Margo D. Beller)

This particular day, Sunday, Feb. 15, the wind has been howling and I've had to go out twice to re-set a feeder in danger of being blown off the pole. I came downstairs at 7:30 a.m. and the birds were already all over the 4 feeders I left out despite the risk of wind. It is wicked cold out, wind chills in the minus numbers and even the enclosed porch's thermometer is showing me 10 degrees.

In short, it's cold and the birds gotta eat to survive.

The early risers are there - cardinals, chickadees, titmice - and a few surprises including a pair of American goldfinches and a Carolina wren that nestled inside the house feeder as the wind rocked it like a cradle. When things calmed it flew to the suet feeder and took advantage of the pounding a larger hairy woodpecker had given the near-frozen fat to take a few nibbles before flying off. I like Carolina wrens and if I had been outside I am sure I'd have heard it singing from somewhere nearby.

But I did not go outside. And at 8am, just as a cloud of house sparrows and house finches descended to push off the birds I do like, there was a gust of wind and a sudden large bird in the yard I just knew to be an accipiter and all the birds scattered. The bird flew to a low branch, giving me a perfect view of it. I saw it was an adult (gray feathers, red breast), male (smaller than the female) sharp-shinned hawk with its rounded head and square tail.

Juvenile Cooper's hawk (Margo D. Beller)

Accipiters are the most feared birds in this area. The sharpy and its larger cousin, the Cooper's hawk, are lightning fast and agile enough to fly between trees in a forest, going after birds, squirrels and other smaller animals. I have seen sharpys fly out of a bush. They seem to come from nowhere (unlike the larger red-tailed hawk, a buteo, which either hovers in the air or sits atop a pole or tree before dropping down to grab prey in an open area like a highway).

The sharpy sat for 10 minutes before catching another gust of wind out of my backyard. It took another 20 minutes for any birds to return to the feeders, and I was not surprised they were the intrepid chickadees and their cousins the titmice.

When I told MH about the sharpy he reminded me what it says in one of my reference guides, "Birds at Your Feeder," when it comes to sharp-shins and Cooper's - they like birds at your feeder.

We have hawks fly through at all times of the year, going after birds, squirrels and chipmunks. We've had a small flock of turkey vultures that somehow found a frozen rabbit carcass in a corner of my yard. We've had broadwing hawks, red-tails and even a juvenile northern goshawk, the largest of the accipiters, that somehow found its way to a low branch in my backyard for a day.

I find the accipiters most interesting. When they are young they are brown, streaky and not very good at catching prey. We've seen several near-misses over the years including the time an American tree sparrow flew out of our caged feeder just as a juvenile Cooper's hit it from the other side. It sat atop the feeder stunned, and I took a picture. I've seen juvenile Coopers on a branch on one side of a tree trunk trying to grab at a squirrel on the other side. It would be funny to watch if it wasn't a life and death struggle. The hawk wants to eat, the squirrel wants to live.

Juvenile Cooper's hawk (R.E. Berg-Andersson)

But accipiters have to learn fast if they want to survive and by the time the streaked breast goes red and the brown feathers turn gray they know how to hunt very well - unfortunately for the junco and the chickadee and the mourning doves I've seen picked off in the yard over the years.

The only thing that kept today's sharp-shinned hawk from catching any of the many birds at my feeders was that sharp wind blowing it off course. Today, the little birds got away. Tomorrow?

I've no doubt that sharpy found something in another yard to fill its crop and allow it to live to hunt another day.

Get Out and Count the Birds!

I was walking in my town one mild afternoon after our most recent snowstorm. Although warmer temperatures melted a lot of it down, much of the white stuff still covered the lawns.

And yet, birds were singing – redbellied woodpeckers, house finches, chickadees, titmice. They are sensing that the worse of winter is over and spring is coming. Who needs the groundhogs?

Somehow, as I was looking ahead, I remembered the Great Backyard Bird Count.

Now, if there is one part of birding I do not like it is keeping complete records. I’ll note what I see but I am not very good about reporting exactly what day I saw what and how may. When I read on the state reporting lists that someone saw 523 herring gulls I have a hard time believing he or she is standing there going one, two, three...

Yet, I enjoy this annual counting of what birds and how many I see at my feeder. The count is co-sponsored by the National Audubon Society (separate from New Jersey Audubon, which is not directly involved in the count) and the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology. It is held every Presidents Day weekend, which means the 2013 count begins this Friday and lasts through Monday.

What you do is simple – you note the types of birds you see in a particular area and how many of them there are in 15-minute increments. You can look at what comes to your feeder or you can travel to a location and count what you see there.

The count has its own website where you can type in your findings. You can look at last year’s data, see which states had the most of a particular kind of bird (or filed the most checklists) and find photos, ways for kids to get involved, maps and even a Twitter feed. Yes, the count is on Facebook and no, there is no fee.

The aim is to aid science. By contributing an accurate count, you are telling the bird experts at Cornell which birds are the most common and not in danger of extinction and which are declining in numbers. According to the count website, “GBBC participants submitted a record-smashing 104,151 checklists with 17.4 million individual bird observations. Participants set new checklist records in 22 states and in six Canadian provinces. Across the continent and in Hawaii, participants identified 623 species.”

That's a lot of birds.

I took this picture of a pair of one of my
 favorite birds, cardinals, which visit my feeders
at all times of the year.

Participants reported the northern cardinal on more checklists than any other species for the eighth year in a row. I recorded them and was happy to do so since cardinals are one of my favorite birds. Learning the number two bird is the mourning dove was no surprise because these seem to be everywhere I look, sometimes outnumbering its cousin the pigeon.

The most numerous bird reported during the 2012 count was the snow goose, which is surprising to someone who sees more often the larger Canada geese – both migrants and the ones that foul town parks and corporate office campuses. 

If this makes you want to count birds all year long, Cornell and Audubon run eBird, which features, data,  news and features. New Jersey Audubon has its own version of eBird, too.

So whether you are off from school or work, when you are running around this Presidents Day weekend look at the birds around you, note the time and location of what you see, especially how many.

Even counter-phobes like me will be out there doing the same.