Subject: [Tweeters] Cle Elum CBC Results
Date: Dec 15 22:10:45 2010
From: Michael Hobbs - BirdMarymoor at frontier.com


Tweets - despite rather dire weather reports, yesterday was a wonderful day
for a CBC. There were 18 people counting in 6 sectors on my Cle Elum
count - thanks so much to all of them.

It was a day for odd-looking results, but they might be explainable by
looking at the conditions. There was a good snow cover, with 6" to a foot
of snow everywhere. Yet temperatures have been mild, and we were mostly
above freezing on the count day. We had about 15-20% open water on ponds,
and the rivers and streams were ice-free and running high.

It must also be said that the weather was good for those counting, which
probably meant people got out of their cars more, and were able to hear
birds better than some years (we've had some horrendous weather on previous
counts).

So the results: No rarities, but we found 10 species of duck, 3 species of
owl (Great Horned, Northern Pygmy, and Northern Saw-whet), 3 WHITE-HEADED
WOODPECKER, 5 Wilson's Snipe, 4 Pileated Woodpecker, 13 Northern Shrike, 30
Bushtit, and 12 American Dipper. We added 2 birds to the all-time circle
total (Cackling Goose and Double-crested Cormorant) to reach 93 species over
6 counts.

We had 73 species, surpassing our previous high of 68, plus 2 count week
species. We set or tied high counts for 25 species!

But our total number of birds was just 3135, well below our average of 3476,
and much lower than our high of 4367 last year.

This shortfall was due to really low numbers of exactly those birds you'd
expect large counts from:

Counts for "abundant" birds (previous average in parentheses)
Wild Turkey 66 (210)
California Quail 66 (113)
American Crow 76 (110)
European Starling 196 (242)
House Finch 161 (317)
American Goldfinch 106 (168)
House Sparrow 183 (208)

We had ZERO CEDAR WAXWINGS (never missed before, with an average of 31) and
ONLY 2 AMERICAN ROBIN (average of 49, but we've they are erratic). And
there were 9 more species where yesterday's count was at least 30 fewer than
a previous high.

We did get significantly higher than average counts for Canada Goose,
Red-tailed Hawk, Steller's Jay, Mountain Chickadee, Red-breasted Nuthatch,
and Golden-crowned Kinglet.

All in all, it was a really good count. Thanks again to all who helped.


= Michael Hobbs
= Cle Elum CBC Compiler
= BirdMarymoor at frontier.com
= http://www.marymoor.org/CECBC/CleElumCBCCircle.htm