Local birders scoured the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge on Sunday, Feb. 15, with beanies and binoculars.
“The Cornell Lab of Ornithology runs several citizen birding programs where people count birds and people upload the data to them,” Tualatin Wildlife Refuge Volunteer Naturalist Diane Cavaness said on Sunday, Feb. 15. “This weekend, there’s a big blitz where they try to get everybody out looking at and counting birds as they can. It’s called the Great Backyard Bird Count.”
The backyard bird count is a nationwide effort organized by Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology that runs yearly from Feb. 13 to Feb. 16. Participants are encouraged to designate 15 minutes to birding at some point over the four-day period and report their findings back to Cornell Lab.
“Each February, for four days, the world comes together for the love of birds. Over these four days, we invite people to spend time in their favorite places watching and counting as many birds as they can find and reporting them to us,” reads the project goal on the Cornell Lab bird count website.
To commemorate the count, Cavaness led a small procession of birders through the refuge on the morning of the fifteenth. The refuge air was punctuated with the distant calls of finches, robins, starlings, and bald eagles as droves of cackling geese rose off the floodplain to join the cloudy grey sky.
“There are lots of ways to find the birds, but listening for them and watching for movement are the two biggest things,” Cavaness said. “Another good way to detect birds is when you see people with binoculars looking at something.”
Cavaness spoke softly as she followed the trails around the wetlands, a small family of birders followed close behind, swapping bird stories and recounting some of their most memorable sightings.
Cavaness, an avid birder who, in addition to her volunteer work at the Tualatin Wildlife Refuge, has worked with the Oregon Birding Association, said that some walks are better than others and explained that although the activity was always a bit of a guessing game, it was always gratifying.
“A lot of times when you’re birding, and there’s nothing,” Cavaness said. “Then all of a sudden, there’s birds everywhere!”
A large variety of birds reside within the confines of the refuge, and in February, cackling Canada geese, mallards and other waterfowl like the northern pintail swoop just above the tallgrass and hide between the bare limbs of the trees.
Mark Fitzsimons, River Experiences Program Manager at the Tualatin River Keepers and avid birder, told Tualatin Life that data collected during events like the backyard bird count and other local birdathons provided important insight into bird activity and populations, as well as habitat quality and restoration impacts.
“There are surveys at places like Cook Family Park,” Fitzsimons said. “Trying to monitor and assess how well habitat restoration worked.”
Fitzsimons said that, for him, the challenge of identifying waterfowl was one of his favorite parts of birding on the Tualatin River.
“Waterfowl are always fascinating as far as an identification challenge,” Fitzsimons said. “Those are easy favorites.”
Cavaness told Sunday’s attendees that they should keep an eye out for American Robins.
“People think robins are a sign of spring, well, not here,” Cavaness said. “We actually have more of them in the winter.”
The refuge’s website says that the area “boasts an average of 20,000 waterfowl during mid-winter, and in some years, over 50,000 have been observed in a single day.”
“Our expectations are always high!” local birder Lucy Morrow told Tualatin Life on her way into the refuge on Sunday. “We’re hoping to see something that came through, migrating or whatever. We’re just here for the birds.”
Morrow said she had been birding since she was little and that she and her birding buddy, Nedra Rezinas, both appreciated the tranquility so imperative to the pastime.
“It’s my zen,” Rezinas said. “I get out here, and I don’t think about other things in my life, I just focus on the moment.”
Sightings logged on the birding website, Ebird.com, show that over the course of the backyard bird count, over 53 different species were seen at the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge. Cavaness logged 33 different species on Sunday.
