Cheney tally part of 125th Christmas Bird Count

Stop-and-go traffic is the norm when Alan McCoy is birding. Especially on the relatively empty back roads near his home south of Spokane.

He’s always scanning the sky, the trees and the power lines. Any birdy-looking blob is a reason to hit the brakes.

Sometimes the blob is just a blob. More often than not, however, the blob is a genuine ornithological surprise.

“Hey! We’ve got a lesser goldfinch right here,” McCoy said last Sunday morning, parking his truck haphazardly across a gravel road and hopping out with a camera.

The lesser goldfinch, a tiny, yellow and black bird, is something “you’d see in Tucson,” McCoy said. “They’re here, but I haven’t seen them for a while.”

There were actually two of them. He took a few pictures and then got back in the truck, where he recorded the pair on a clipboard, turning the birds into data points for the 125th iteration of the world’s longest-running citizen science project: the Christmas Bird Count.

Led by the National Audubon Society, the annual census draws thousands of volunteers into the field each year to count birds in specific areas across the continent each winter. It produces a staggering pile of data that researchers use to track the long-term health of bird populations.

It all started in 1900 as a response to a separate bird-related holiday tradition. Hunters used to hold Christmas side hunts — a competition between two teams to see who could kill the most birds.

Frank Chapman, an ornithologist and early Audubon Society officer, wasn’t fond of that idea. He proposed a new idea: Instead of killing the birds, count them.

That first year, a group of 27 birders held 25 counts across the continent. There were counts in a dozen states from New Hampshire to California and a couple in Canada. About 90 species were recorded, and a tradition was born.

The counts have continued every year since, and they’ve expanded far and wide. Last year, there were more than 2,600 counts conducted by more than 83,000 volunteers, according to Audubon records. They take place in all 50 states plus Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico and more.

Each count follows a few key guidelines. It must take place on a single day between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5 and it must be focused on a specific area, known as a count circle.

Within the circle, which is 15 miles wide, birders fan out and do their best to log every wild feathered creature they find either on paper or on an app called eBird. Once it’s over, a compiler puts the data together and submits it to the National Audubon Society.

Volunteers get a kick out of contributing to such a vast database, but that’s not the only reason people participate year after year. It’s also just a good reason to go birding.

“It’s an Easter egg hunt,” said Don Goodwin, an avid birder and longtime Christmas count participant who is also the director of bands at Eastern Washington University.

Last Sunday was gameday for the Cheney count. McCoy, the president of the Spokane Audubon Society, established the Cheney count circle in 2018.

The group gathered at McCoy’s house was headed into the field, covering the territory by car and by foot.

Around 7:30 a.m., they hunched over a map while McCoy told the group where they’d spend the morning. One pair was assigned to walk the Cheney wetlands. A trio was dispatched to the east side of the Slavin Conservation Area.

McCoy has lived in Spokane since the early 1980s. He’s a piano technician by trade. For four decades, he tuned and fixed pianos around the region, including a long stint as the main technician for the pianos at EWU’s music department.

He picked up birding in his 20s, and the bug bit hard. There are binoculars staged at different spots in his house, just in case.

He likes birding because he never knows exactly what he’s going to see. And, when he does hit the brakes and reach for the binoculars, it takes some work to figure out what he’s looking at.

“It’s just fun to puzzle it out yourself,” he said.

There’s a bird book in the truck, but he hardly needs it. He seems to have every species memorized, along with their calls.

At Slavin Conservation Area, he and the other two volunteers walked about three miles and logged 29 species, some by sound but most by sight. Most of the birds were waterfowl hanging out in the wetlands – hundreds of Canada geese, at least five species of ducks, two types of swans and one blue heron.

Around noon, the group convened at Fish Lake and compared notes. Everybody agreed there were a lot of crossbills around. Nobody had seen a robin. Someone had seen a kestrel falcon. Someone else had seen a shrike. There was a picture of a swan that needed to be analyzed – was it a tundra or a trumpeter?

They also traded stories about past Christmas counts. The weather is never guaranteed to be good, and they’ve all toughed out days with blowing snow and freezing temperatures. This year wasn’t so bad.

It was midday, and the action was slow at the lake. The group drove over to a house in Marshall, where the owners were having people over to watch their bird feeders and scan a nearby pond. Just before everyone packed up to leave, a Cooper’s hawk showed up, providing a jolt of excitement.

When they left, there was about an hour of daylight left. One group called it good, handing McCoy a few pages with their counts for the day.

McCoy and the others searched longer, running a three-car convoy through the countryside as they found the last few birds of the day.

To the uninitiated, birding may seem monotonous, like something that can’t be done for eight consecutive hours.

But for people like McCoy, it stays exciting all day long. He stays focused. The next blob in a tree could lead to something special.

At one spot, he pulled over for a red tailed hawk, then watched as it flew across the road. A raven showed up and started pestering the hawk.

They swooped and darted, and the raven seemed to get the upper hand.

It was the sort of high drama you miss if you don’t stop and look for it.

“It’s just fun,” McCoy said. “Unless you’re the red tail.”