Back in my landlubber days Christmas Bird Counts
(CBCs) were always a highlight of the winter holiday season. We would suit up
for the weather and spend the day counting birds within our ‘count circle’. At
the end of the day we would meet up with the other birders and tally our
observations. The Christmas Bird Count is managed by the National Audubon
Society in the United States and this year will be the 112th count. This
citizen science program provides avian scientists with data to look for trends
in abundance and distribution of individual bird species.
Now, for the second year, cruisers and other
mariners can be part of a similar large-scale citizen science effort. This
Christmas bird count, not affiliated with Audubon, is called a SeaBC. Last
year’s inaugural count spanned one hundred degrees of latitude from Maine to
Antarctica. The second SeaBC is scheduled for November-January and this year
we’re encouraging mariners to simply take digital photos of birds seen at sea.
It’s fine if you’re not a seabird expert! Seabirds can be difficult to
identify—even for experts. Take digital photos and jot down notes, saving the
identification for later with the help of the online community at the Birding
Aboard Facebook page.
There are several good bird identification
guides for the Caribbean. Birds
of the West Indies (Princeton Field Guides)
, by Herbert Raffaele, James Wiley, Orlando Garrido, Allan Keith and
Janis Raffaele (2003) is a good resource for land or sea travels in the
Caribbean.
Additional resources, including instructions and
tally sheets, are posted on www.facebook.com/Birding.Aboard, under the button
for SeaBC resources. All data goes to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s
eBird database, which has easy online reporting and is available in English,
French, Spanish and Portuguese (www.ebird.org). The data becomes a resource for
scientists and citizens worldwide and is shared with other conservation
organizations such as BirdLife International and National Audubon Society.
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