Christmas Bird Count returns to B.C.’s Lower Mainland | 24CA News

Take seven steps, cease, look, hear, repeat. That’s one of many largest guidelines in birding, in response to Michael Klotz.

He and a bunch of native birders gathered Thursday to assist decide the tendencies of our feathered mates within the Lower Mainland. The first Christmas Bird Count since 2019 had fanatics head out to maintain a tally of what they noticed.

The annual occasion – largely placed on maintain in the course of the pandemic – dates again greater than century and is now North America’s longest-running citizen science challenge with members in additional than 2,000 areas throughout the Western Hemisphere.

“This circle itself started in 1964 here in Surrey. They started that count. The actual Christmas bird count started in 1900,” Klotz stated.

The occasion started as an annual hunt, however as since morphed right into a much less deadly solution to monitor chook populations.

Volunteers disperse and attempt to get a snapshot of the place the birds are and log every confirmed sighting.

The knowledge is then submitted on-line to the Audubon Society and Birds Canada and broadly used to tell biologists, environmental planners and naturalists world wide. It permits them to check tendencies in chook populations year-over-year.

“It’s really important that we understand what do our numbers look like? Are in increasing, are we decreasing? Are there different species?” Klotz stated.

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The knowledge additionally helps the Nature Conservancy of Canada discover out the place they should focus their conservation efforts.

Klotz says it takes an actual ardour and information of birds, but additionally fairly the ear.

“Your birding is 50 per cent listening to birds to see what they sound like. Identification is a little easier if you know what you’re listening for and then typically you hear them before you see them.”