Tweets,
Wanted to elaborate just a little on this. Several of us in Yakima put a dedicated effort this year to do two "formal" counts from the same location on Friday and Saturday night. As Jeff indicated his group tallied just slightly over 92,000 (92,633 to be exact) on Friday eve. My group tonight repeated the count. Our main goal was not to pit one night against the other, but to see if numbers flucuated from night to night.

I'm going to paste in a message I just sent to birdyak:
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Here is a recap of the "two night event". Last night the team counted 92, 633 robins. Tonight there were three of us, Rich, I and Kelly. We divided the sky. A few robins were beginning to move when I got there at 4:10. Rich and Kelly's methods differed a little from mine. They counted for 5 minute intervals estimating the best they could. Rich had Hwy.12 north to our station, Kelly had directly overhead and I took everything north of our station (many of them are higher and up to a mile north of the counting station). I counted by 50's, but could only keep up that pace for 2 minutes, so I counted for 2 minutes, took a minute off to rest my eyes and made the assumption that the per minute rates were same for the third minute as the first two. For example, at 4:42-4:44 I counted 1850 robins and estimated that from 4:44-4:45 there were approximately 925 that I missed (1850/2). As stated by Jeff the peak seemed to be from about 4:45-5:00. During the peak each counter was getting roughly 900-1000 robins per minute, so going past in total was about 2700 or so robins per minute, wow! I just got home tallied and the numbers. Kelly had 25, 250 in his path, Rich had 31, 700 in his path and I had 41, 631. This comes to a total of 98, 581. I would bet that either night we are only accurate at best to +/-5000 robins, so basically the two nights tallied fairly close totals (saturday was 5,948 higher or 6% higher) that difference is well within the margin of error I'm sure the count has. Given the sheer number of robins going past, it is actually amzing to me that there was such regularity in the two nights. Our count ended at 5:30 for a total of 1 hour 20 minutes.
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Thats really an amazing. Not only in the sheer numbers, but that two groups over two different nights have counted the birds flying into the roost and gotten such close numbers. The big question still unanswered is that are these the same birds each night or is there some push to the north each day and new birds move in. We still don't know as attempts to examine the roosts in the morning have found much fewer birds than the evening, so birds are getting away uncounted in the morning. This two night count though suggests that there is some multiple night stability in the roost.

If you are just looking for something to do, come on over to the roost in the next week or so and witness an amazing event. Just try to imagine the 2700 or so birds per minute that I mention above! Feel free to email me for directions to the viewing area if you need them or I'm sure Jeff would be happy to answer directions as well.

Scott Downes
downess at charter.net
Yakima WA