A hundred years ago, the men of American households would grab their dogs and their bird-hunting rifles for a bit of Boxing Day fun. The previous days' meal sitting heavy in their stomachs, and feeling a certain lassitude from Christmas revelry, it would have seemed natural to engage in a bit of sport with other fellows from the neighbourhood.
Grabbing their dogs and their guns, they would have headed out to the nearest lake, wood or corn field for a little competitive bird-hunting. A few hours later, they'd celebrate the winner, the man with the most kills.
Fast-forward to 2015 and a similar competitive spirit can be found during the holidays.
But instead of a hunt with dead birds as the booty, local bird watchers compete with their kind from across North America for the most numerous and varied bird sightings.
The sporting fun now called the Christmas Bird Count by the Audubon Society is a change welcomed by local ornithologists, including members of the the Burke Mountain Naturalists (BMN), who have participated in the annual event with Pitt Meadows birders for more than 20 years.
With a 15-square-mile area as their responsibility, which includes Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam and only a smidgeon of Port Moody - Shoreline Park because it is so species-rich - the group typically spots between 8,000 and 10,000 birds.
Last year, according to BMN's Elaine Golds, the group counted 8,412 individual birds for a total of 84 species. The DeBoville Slough area had the highest number of species sightings at 52, and some of the more exotic birds spotted that day included a ruddy duck, a peregrine falcon, a white-fronted goose, a sandhill crane and a snow goose - the latter the first ever recorded during the annual Christmas Bird Count in the Tri-Cities.
"It ends up being a scientific count because the data has been kept for so many years," said Golds.
This year, the annual Christmas Bird Count takes place on Saturday, Jan. 3, with about 60 volunteers expected to help out. The Tri-Cities information is collected and sent to Bird Studies Canada, which shares the statistics with the National Audubon Society in the U.S.
The competitiveness of the count is still very strong, even after all these years, and participants will go to great lengths to make sure they see as many birds as possible, even counting a common house sparrow while they take a break at a local coffee shop.
"There's a little bit of competition to see who can get the most species," Golds acknowledged, but she said it's a marked improvement over the old Boxing Day bird hunt that was transformed by conservationist Frank Chapman in 1900 into the modern Christmas bird count.
For so many birds to be killed in sport is tantamount to "a vandalism of nature," Golds said, "There's nothing gentlemanly about it at all."
The Christmas Bird Count, in contrast, helps keep tabs on the species to ensure their variety and longevity.
To volunteer for the Christmas Bird Count, email the Burke Mountain Naturalists at [email protected]
