Dalton Spencer
The 5th Annual Lewis County CBC, while once again wet, was another record breaking year! We had 33 field participants and 11 feeder watchers which is a record for number of participants.
We tallied 107 species and 2 additional count week birds (Yellow-rumped Warbler and Ring-necked Pheasant). This breaks last year’s record of 104 species plus three additional count week species.
We had 5 never recorded before species: Greater White-Fronted Goose, Brant (only the third county record), Horned Grebe (7th record for the western part of the county and only the 2nd ever winter record for Western Lewis County), Townsend’s Solitaire (only the third winter record for the county), and Orange-crowned Warbler. While Orange-crowned Warbler and Greater White-Fronted Goose have been on the count checklist since its inception and have been highly expected, they just kept slipping through unseen.
Overall, 30,491 individual birds were tallied of which 12,227 were passerines and 18,423 were non-passerines. This difference of over 6000 individuals is by far the greatest difference between the two sub-groupings of birds we have had on the count to date. This count is also the highest number of individuals we have tallied on our CBC.
Our biggest misses for the count this year were definitely White-Throated Sparrow which had been recorded on all previous counts. While we did have Yellow-rumped Warbler for the count week, we were unable to locate one on count day which is also a first miss for this CBC.
Twenty-nine species recorded high counts this year, notably Dunlin (6680% increase), Peregrine Falcon (600% increase), and Snow Goose (366.66% increase). I also think it is kind of funny that last year we had 214 Common Ravens and 215 this year which is only an increase of 0.46%.
Eurasian Wigeon (5 birds) tied its high count and 2 species recorded low counts (Yellow-rumped Warbler and White-Throated Sparrow). Both Hermit Thrush (1 individual) and Wood Duck (2 individuals) tied their lowest counts.
Ring-billed Gull, Anna’s Hummingbird, Golden-crowned Kinglet, and Dark-eyed Junco have all curiously increased in every count so far thus they are the only 4 species to record a high count in every count.
Black Phoebe also recorded a high count of 5 individuals, which seems to cement us as the farthest north CBC to have recorded more than 2 Black Phoebes in a single year.
Over the last 5 years, 72 species have been recorded on every count which seems to establish those species as most consistent within the circle.
Our five most common species this year were:
European Starling (3797)
American Wigeon (3493)
Cackling Goose (2347)
Pine Siskin (2113)
Dunlin (2034)
Thank you to all our participants and see you next December.
Photo credit: Black Phoebe, Sacramento, CA. Andrew Johnson. Wikimedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BlackPhoebe-28DEC2017.jpg
