Alison Baker

I am not an avid birder. Getting up in the dark on one of the shortest days of the year in order to go outside and stand in the frost, hoping to see a bird, is not my idea of fun.

But then comes the day after Christmas, and there I am, outside. Great flocks of robins are devouring the berries in the hollies around me, and every one of them is singing about it. Bringing in a delicate descant are the cedar waxwings, and here and there yellow-rumped warblers in the Virginia pines are chiming in like little avian piccolos. The tops of the mountains are lost in fog, and as I stand there surrounded by birdsong the sun rises and the fog is suddenly blinding white, and the hoarfrost on the grasses leaps into sparkling brilliance.

It’s another Christmas Bird Count.

The aim of the CBC (as aficionados call it) is to take a nationwide one-day census of the birds. Each group of birders tries to count every species, and every individual bird, within a particular geographic area. Beginners and experts go out together, which works pretty well; a novice sees something move, cries, “A big brown bird!” and the expert says “Yellow-shafted flicker” faster than you could say Jack Robinson. Watching and listening to experts, you pick up clues to a bird’s identity in its song, the way it bobs its tail, whether it perches on a utility line or on the pole, whether it hovers over a field or swoops through the branches of the trees. You learn how to estimate the number of birds in a flock. You begin to see the difference between a turkey vulture and a red-tailed hawk even when they’re so high you can’t see a single detail.

I can't put my finger on why it's so exciting to hear yet another kingfisher, or identify the ninth kestrel of the day, or spot a brown creeper popping up the trunk of an oak tree. It's partly the competition to see who can spot the most birds, partly the desire to see a new species, partly the idea that we’re gathering useful statistics for professional ornithologists.

People who watch birds have always been aware of trends in bird populations. Some winters there are lots of juncos, others there are few. Some years Rose-breasted grosbeaks come to your feeders, some winters they don’t. These days, though, the trends seem less benign, because we know that global warming is affecting the birds permanently. Climate change will cause some species to alter their behaviors; it will drive others into extinction. Birding has become a bittersweet obsession.

Going out on the Christmas Bird Count is a way of being a witness for the birds. We go out to make sure every bird is counted, because every bird counts.

But we really go for the pure exhilaration of doing it. It's a Zen-like experience, a chance to pay attention to nothing but birds, to be, for one day, a single-minded fanatic.

This year I had a cold. So I stayed home and counted American goldfinches and tufted titmice in my own neighborhood; I counted 24 species and – thanks to the starlings – more than 600 individual birds. Next year I’ll go out into the field again, and spend the day crunching across frozen grass, scanning the hedgerows for quick movements and bobbing tails and the skies for widespread, soaring wings. The next Christmas Bird Count is only 352 days away.

WMRA, Civic Soapbox