The 31st annual St. Albert Christmas Bird Count is Dec. 26. The annual event sees about a hundred amateur ornithologists patrol a 24-kilometre-wide zone centred on the old St. Albert Airport in search of birds for scientific research.
Count co-ordinator Dave Cleary said he is looking for as many counters as he can get this year. Volunteers can either count birds at home as feeder watchers or patrol the outdoors as a bush-beater (which does not actually involve hitting bushes, he noted).
Due to the pandemic, Cleary said this year’s participants will be required to wear masks while in close contact with others and asked to forgo the usual post-count celebrations.
Last year’s count saw 106 people spot 5,610 birds from 34 species, including the never-before-seen yellow-rumped warbler and Lapland longspur. There were also a record number of downy and pileated woodpeckers.
One potential guest star for this year’s count is the Townsend’s solitaire, said St. Albert birder Alan Hingston. Resembling a thin, long-tailed robin with a white eye-ring, two of these birds were spotted around the St. Albert grain elevators earlier this month.
“It’s normally a bird of the mountains and foothills,” Hingston said, and just seven have been spotted in the count’s history.
If these birds stick around until Boxing Day, it would be the first time since 2012 that a Townsend’s solitaire has been spotted during the St. Albert count, Hingston said.
Hingston said this is shaping up to be a good year for redpolls and pine grosbeaks — irruptive species whose numbers fluctuate wildly from year to year. It is too soon to say the same for bohemian waxwings, which are often one of the most numerous birds in any count; most tend to dine in the countryside in December before moving into urban areas in January.
Cleary asked volunteers to email count data manager James Fox at [email protected] with questions on the count.
Visit tabsoft.co/2rE75h4 to explore records of past St. Albert bird counts.
