{"id":13293,"date":"2015-12-09T07:05:51","date_gmt":"2015-12-09T07:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/?p=13293"},"modified":"2025-08-07T21:06:04","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T02:06:04","slug":"13293-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lafeber.com\/pet-birds\/13293-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Christmas Bird Count"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christmas Time: Remember Your Outdoor Birds<\/h2>\n
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Photo by Melissa Burovac\/Unsplash<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This holiday time of year is a busy time \u2014 gift gathering and giving and lots of things to choose from for us humans and our birds. While our \u201cinside\u201d birds are tucked into their warm cages, we might gaze out the window and wonder about our \u201coutside\u201c birds! One important Christmas event with significant ramifications is the Christmas Bird Count of the Audubon Society.<\/p>\n

The Christmas Bird Count was started as a way to replace a hunting tradition with one having\u00a0important conservation ramifications. In the late 1800s, there was a Christmas tradition of a \u201cSide Hunt\u201d where \u201csides\u201d where chosen and hunting of any feathered or furred creature was the sport of the day. The \u201cside\u2019 with the largest pile of animals and birds killed won the event. To counter this slaughter of animals, ornithologist and one of the organizers of the fledgling Audubon Society, Frank Chapman, organized the first Christmas day bird count December 25, 1900. This new tradition, the “Christmas Bird Census, would count birds during the holidays rather than hunt them. It all started with 27 birders who\u00a0were willing to count these wild birds from Toronto, Canada to California. That first count included about 90 species of birds.<\/p>\n

Each November, birders interesting in participating in the Christmas Bird Count or CBC can sign up and join in through the Audubon website. From December 14 through January 5 each year, tens of thousands of volunteers throughout the Americas brave snow, wind, or rain to take part in the effort to count our native wild birds. Audubon and other organizations use data collected in this long-running wildlife census to assess the health of bird populations \u2014 and to help guide conservation action.<\/p>\n

The data collected by observers over the past century have allowed Audubon researchers, conservation biologists, wildlife agencies and other interested individuals to study the long-term health and status of bird populations across North America. When combined with other surveys, such as the Breeding Bird Survey, it provides a picture of how the continent’s bird populations have changed in time and space over the past hundred years.<\/p>\n

The Audubon Society has been instrumental in understanding and assessing the impact of the climate and man on the wild bird populations. The\u00a0data derived from the Christmas Bird Count have been shown to be an important conservation piece in the following ways:<\/p>\n