Staff writer
The weather outside may be frightful, but for the past 35 years, nothing has kept a committed group of Washington County bird-watchers from tabulating a Christmas bird count for the Audubon Society.
On Dec. 20, eight field volunteers braved the cold and fanned out over a 15-mile radius from Hart's Mill, Amwell Township, while another 10 to 15 monitored bird feeders from the comforts of their homes.
"Even if we had 50 people, to cover every square inch would be difficult," said Dr. Tom Contreras, an assistant professor of biology at Washington & Jefferson College who specializes in ecology and conservation biology.
Among the unusual sightings this year were white-winged crossbills, a type of finch.
Male crossbills are red, while females are green. They have distinctive white stripes on their wings. The birds were seen at Camp Anawanna near Prosperity, Morris Township, and Washington Cemetery.
"They hang out with conifer trees," Contreras said. As the name implies, their lower and upper mandible do cross, which enables the bird to extract pine cone seeds.
"They are a more northern species," Contreras said. "Seeing them this far south is very, very unusual."
The professor described the birds as a little bit bigger than a sparrow.
Seeing crossbills around here makes them what Contreras, an ecologist, calls an irruptive species. "Where they generally winter, there may be a food shortage. Because they're seed eaters, it probably had something to do with the pine cones or seeds they were able to find," Contreras said.
The crossbills were spotted along with what Contreras called "the usual suspects - chickadees, titmice, cardinals and nuthatches."
For decades, the Christmas bird count and the local college have been intertwined.
"I started it 35 years ago," said Dr. Tom Hart, retired biology professor who formerly taught at W&J.
"From me, it went to (Dr. Roy) Ickes. Roy was the ornithologist, I was the botanist. We started with chalkboards. Then we used a primitive spreadsheet on an Apple II computer," Hart said.
"We used to mail the reports," said Hart's wife, Myrna. Now, the counts are submitted electronically to the Audubon Society's Web site.
Other Christmas bird counts are conducted in Greene County, Buffalo Creek and at various locations in the Pittsburgh area.
Contreras has until Jan. 7 to compile and report the local results to the Audubon Society. According to the organization's Web site as of Friday, 204 Christmas bird counts have tabulated 11,686,899 birds thus far.
Noting differences in the bird count is significant because a reduction in bird population can signal loss of habitat or a change in the quality of the habitat, usually attributed to human activity, Contreras said.