Prior to 1900, hunters engaged in a holiday tradition called the Christmas ‘Side Hunt’. Groups would choose sides and go afield to see which side could bring in the biggest pile of furred and feathered quarry. On Christmas day 1900, ornithologist Frank Chapman, an officer in the then nascent Audubon society, proposed that they go afield and count birds rather than kill them. He and twenty-nine other birders conducted twenty-five bird counts across the United States. Every year since, between December 14 - January 5, in what has grown to thousands of sites in which tens of thousands of people participate, is now known as the Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count (CBC). This year, 2024-2025, is the 125th year and is the oldest running citizen science project in North America.
The Cole Camp area, because of its diverse habitats of prairies, lakes, woodlands/forests, pas-tures and crop fields, is considered an Audubon IBA (important bird area). On December 30, 2024, we conducted our 16th annual CBC. Each site across the United States is a circle with a 15 mile diameter. The center of our area is located on Drover’s Prairie, just west of the intersec-tion of highways 65 and 52 forming a circle with a radius of 7.5 miles.
This is the eighth year Ryan Steffens, a Missouri Master Naturalist and Missouri Department of Conservation employee from Cole Camp, has coordinated the logistics for our count. We sur-vey the same area each year which is divided into eight sections. Ryan assigns personnel to each section providing them with maps and data sheets. Each group has at least one experi-enced birder. With the help of binoculars and spotting scopes, the goal is to count every bird and to identify each species seen in all sections from dawn to dusk (actually midnight to midnight).
My wife Kim and I are assigned each year to section 1A which is north of Highway 52 and west of Highway E. Once again our good friend, Rachel Kissinger, was able to join us. We started at dawn and by dusk, we had been out 9.75 hours, traveled 73.2 miles, counted 12,586 individual birds and identified 51 different species in our section.
This year there were a total of 20 participants from Warsaw, Cole Camp, Green Ridge, Windsor, St. James, Russellville, Wheatland, Marshall and MDC staff from Jefferson City. Each group’s recorded data from their section was turned into Ryan, who compiled information submitting it to the Audubon Society.
The total number of birds for this year’s count was 22,278 with a total of 77 different species. Bird numbers were down by 5,766 and species were up by eight from last year’s survey. This year we had nice weather from the mid 30s to the mid 50s with partly cloudy skies and light winds.
With the exception of blackbird species and sparrows species, some of the most commonly observed birds were: Red-tailed Hawk - 117, Eastern Bluebirds - 267, Blue Jays - 330, Northern Cardinals - 344 and Western/Eastern Meadowlarks - 581. The most unusual observation was one Golden Eagle!
Our data, along with data from other counts across the state and nation, will be compiled and compared to past surveys to obtain a long term view of the health and status of bird populations in North America and provide a picture of how the continent’s bird populations have changed in time and space. The long term perspective is vital for conservationists to protect birds and their habitats and help identify environmental issues.
Almost all our native bird species are in decline, some perilously so, especially grassland spe-cies. The biggest contributing factors are fragmentation and loss of habitat, followed by chemical use that directly affects birds or moves up the food chain also affecting bird populations.
“[What is the] extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?”
-Naturalist Robert Michael Pyle
