Counts are about more than just birds
Thick frost rimmed the ground as we stood near the shore of
Paicines Reservoir early Sunday morning. We were just warming up
for a long day in some of the most beautiful landscapes California
has to offer.
Each year, volunteers show up in a curious attempt to identify
and count every single bird within 15-mile diameter circles,
scattered across the land from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay to the Florida
Keys.
Counts are about more than just birds
Thick frost rimmed the ground as we stood near the shore of Paicines Reservoir early Sunday morning. We were just warming up for a long day in some of the most beautiful landscapes California has to offer.
Each year, volunteers show up in a curious attempt to identify and count every single bird within 15-mile diameter circles, scattered across the land from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay to the Florida Keys.
It’s the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, an annual tradition dating back to the beginning of the last century.
The first counts were intended to replace an even older tradition, that of taking a day around Christmas each year to go afield shooting everything that made itself available.
Is it science? Not in the truest sense. But it’s undeniably fun. And over time, as people return to the same mapped circles, trend data begins to emerge.
There are count circles scattered all over our region, in Coyote Valley, Panoche Valley, across Monterey and Santa Cruz counties and at Pinnacles National Monument, where we were on Sunday.
The Pinnacles Count is curious, because the country is rugged, and what’s not in the park is held privately. That means most of the counting takes place either along trails in the park or along the few roads that cross the landscape. It’s also curious because the western side of the count is not conveniently linked to the eastern side by any roads.
We were joined by a father-and-son team from the Stockton area. The father is an orchardist with a keen appreciation for the outdoors, and a desire to infect his electrical engineer son with the same passion.
Our job was simple enough: start at the northern edge of the count circle on Airline Highway, 10 miles south of the Paicines Store, work our way south out of the circle, then back in on Willow Creek Road. Just for good measure, a friend gave access to his 200-ranch, a landscape that captures both sweeping vistas of the Pinnacles and surface evidence of the San Andreas Fault.
Sunday’s frost quickly gave way to one of those crystalline winter days that people who don’t live on the Central Coast just can’t believe we experience. By afternoon, we were in shirtsleeves.
What did we see?
Well, birds. But we also stopped to admire a bobcat, hunting in a pasture off Airline Highway. We watched the cat as he stalked a ground squirrel or mouse. The animal resembled nothing as much as a house cat in its crouch and staccato stop-start approach.
When we left, the bobcat had still not secured breakfast, but the commodity a bobcat seems to have in greatest abundance is time.
Soon after, a deer watched as we passed.
We watched two flocks of wild turkeys feeding. We lost count of the ground squirrels racing everywhere.
We got good looks at the bird people always think of when they make fun of birders, the Red-breasted Sapsucker. (Yes, they do suck sap. They’re the animal responsible for those neat rows of little holes seen on many trees in our area).
We scattered scores of quail, and admired hawks knifing through the wind.
A Sharp-shinned Hawk, a specialist in catching birds, obliged by perching cooperatively over the road.
Stopping for lunch at the Pinnacles Campground, we peered at the ridge above. There, perched in a digger pine, were seven California Condors. As soon as the temperatures warmed a bit more, four more of the enormous birds began soaring over the ridge. That’s 11 members of Pinnacles’ population of 21.
At the end of a long day, we gathered for dinner and to compare notes. In all, we logged 106 species for the 2008 Pinnacles Count.
I’m certain that had we logged them we would have had an even longer list of memories.
