Christmas Bird Count continues on Saipan, Tinian

The annual Christmas Bird Count, headed by the Audubon Society and the Division of Fish and Wildlife, will be held anew for its 18th edition since being first introduced in the Commonwealth in the 1980s.

The event will be held this Thursday, Dec. 30, on Tinian, and Sunday, Jan. 2, on Saipan. Participants on Saipan will meet at the DFW parking lot in Lower Base at 6am. A $5 fee is required.

According to head organizer Shelly Kremer, a biologist at DFW, the event requires interested volunteers to help count birds around the islands.

“This is a good way for us to monitor birds and species diversity through time,” Kremer said yesterday. “It’s a good way to see if species are declining or increasing.”

Kremer said the fee would go toward purchasing the book American Birds, which includes all species, locations, numbers of birds, and names of all participants from each location.

Data from the count would be kept for comparison with future and past counts.

Last year, about 15 volunteers—the most in the event’s history for Saipan—helped in the count. The count indicated a 7-percent increase in birds from last year and the year before, with 2,860 birds counted in 2003, compared with the 2,672 recorded in 2002. Only four volunteers took part in 2002.

Kremer said the activity will not be held on Rota this year due to lack of manpower. In addition to counts that will be held on Saipan and Tinian, about 2,000 individual counts are scheduled to take place between Dec. 14, 2004 and Jan. 5, 2005.

The Christmas Bird Count began over a century ago when 27 conservationists in 25 locations, led by scientist and writer Frank Chapman, changed the course of ornithological history. On Christmas Day 1900, the small group posed an alternative to the “side hunt,” a Christmas Day activity in which teams compete to determine who could shoot the most birds and small mammals.

Instead, Chapman proposed to identify, count, and record all the birds they saw, establishing what is now considered the world’s most significant citizen-based conservation effort and a more-than-a-century-old institution.

“Having fun while birding yields important results that affect bird conservation,” Geoff Le Baron, National Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count director, said in a statement. “Audubon and our partners at the Patuxent Wildlife Research center and the Boreal Species Initiative have analyzed information collected by CBC participants over the last several years; for the first time, we have good estimates of population trends for several species.”

As Audubon approaches its centennial next year, over 55,000 volunteers from all 50 states, every Canadian province, parts of Central and South America, Bermuda, the West Indies, and the Pacific islands, will count and record every individual bird and bird species seen in a specified area. During the 104th count—last year—about 63 million birds were counted.

Count results from 1900 to the present are available through Audubon’s website www.audubon.org/bird/cbc