AREA BIRD WATCHERS SET FOR ANNUAL CHRISTMAS COUNT; DATA PUBLISHED BY NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY

Local bird watchers were out in the wild this weekend taking part in the annual Christmas Bird Count, a tradition almost a century old.

Local Christmas bird counters are among more than 45,000 volunteers participating in the National Audubon Society 98th Christmas Bird Count.

About 1,700 individual Christmas Bird Counts will be held from Dec. 19 to Jan. 4.

Members of the local Four Seasons Audubon Society will be counting birds over the next three weeks. On Saturday, they were at Mingo National Wildlife Refuge. Sunday they were scheduled to count at Big Oak Tree State Park south of East Prairie. On Saturday, they are to count birds at Horseshoe Lake Conservation Area in Southern Illinois, and on Jan. 4 members are scheduled to count birds at Trail of Tears State Park.

The participants, about 25 people from Farmington, Poplar Bluff, Cape Girardeau and elsewhere in the region, met at a cafe in Puxico at 6 Saturday morning before beginning their count.

Mingo is a popular because it's known to host lots of species, according to Bill Eddleman of the Four Seasons Audubon Society. The counters spotted 99 different bird species at Mingo last year and expected to break 100 this year because of the mild winter.

Last year was the first year the counters recorded a blue-gray gnat-catcher at Mingo. But finding unusual species isn't the true value of the bird count, Eddleman said.

"The real scientific use is not turning up the unusual. It's monitoring the normal. We can see the ups and downs."

Things can change relatively quickly in the bird world. Ten years ago, house finches did not exist in the wild in the U.S. Now the house finch is the most common bird found at feeders, Eddleman says.

Monitoring these ups and downs "serves as a kind of early warning system that something is going on with this species," he said.

In the first year of the Christmas Bird Count, 27 conservationists decided to protest the traditional bird shoot that preceded legal protection of migratory birds. Instead of killing birds, the conservationists counted them on Christmas Day 1900.

This year, volunteers from all 50 states, every Canadian province, parts of Central and South America, Bermuda, the West Indies and Pacific islands will count and record every individual bird and bird species encountered during one calendar day.

Each count group has a designated circle 15 miles in diameter, about 177 square miles, where they try to cover as much ground as possible within a 24-hour period.

The data collected by each count group is sent to the National Audubon Society headquarters in New York. Count data is published annually by the society.

The count is 100 percent volunteer generated.

The data from 1900 forward is expected to be available in the future on the BirdSource website, a cooperative project of the National Audubon Society and the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology.

"For nearly a century, the Christmas Bird Count has provided invaluable insight into the past and present status and health of North American bird populations, as well as the general health of our environment," said Eddleman.