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Big Day Bird Count 2021 5/10/2021 9:12:09 AM
How it goes with people and weather when you are counting birds. The emails started coming in about the Big Day Bird Count from Cornell e-bird. It’s a day where people all around the world count birds and report them to the e-bird database. It sounds like fun to birding enthusiast. We want to be part of the count! This event creates a greater awareness of nature in human communities around the world. For some organizations, the Big Day is a chance to do some serious fund raising.
Knowing that most of my community’s birders would not get up at 6 am nor last the entire day, I set up a schedule starting at 8 am for the early birders. Then at 9:30 am we would move on to the next park, then the next at 11 am. We’d stop at noon for lunch and hit the next site at 2 pm.
The parks here in Bayonne NJ offer various habitats for birds. Peter Dunne once wrote, “To find birds, find water.” Bayonne NJ is surrounded by water on three sides. We have Newark Bay to the west and New York Bay to the east. The Kill Van Kull is a narrow water passage that connects to two larger bodies of water. Birds make the leap from Staten Island over the water to Bayonne to the edge of the Bergen ridge. Our parks are great stop-overs for tired and hungry birds on their way to the northern forests.
The weather makes or breaks a Big Day Bird Count. If it is sunny and warm you can see lots of warblers as they hop from tree branch to tree branch in search of caterpillars or beetles. When the tide pulls back, we have sandy shorelines where the Yellow-crowned Night Heron, a threatened species in New Jersey, still struggle to find worms and feed their chicks. Clapper Rails come through in May looking for brackish waters and tall reeds for nesting sites.
Our Big Day in 2021 offered some clouds, some rain and in the afternoon, some sunshine before threatening us with big purple-blue clouds. These dark sky-ward monsters and the remnant fears of the Covid-19 pandemic caused us to abandon hopes of gathering afterward in a restaurant to celebrate and share the joy of finding 55 species of birds that included Clapper Rails, Oyster Catchers, Night Herons, Blue-winged Warblers and Northern Parulas.
