For the past several years Yakima Audubon has taken upon the duty of counting an annual phenomenon, the massive amounts of robins that fly into roost near Sun Tides Golf Course near Yakima in February. I've pasted a clip below of what I sent to Tweeters last February as part of the Great Backyard Bird Count (I'm the Washington Reviewer and really encourage everyone to help add to this citizen science project). This year, Yakima Audubon is sponsoring a tally effort and encouraging people to see the spectacle. Time is 4:30 pm at the intersection of the Old Naches Highway and Galloway Road off of Hwy. 12 west of Yakima on Saturday Feb. 13, 2010. If you want an experience seeing literally thousands of robins per minute flying past your field of view, please join us! If you need further information on directions, I can help.

>From last year's count:

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 amazing 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.

The plan this year is to have several official counters, myself included and a person to help visitors observe the robins, complete with scope set up to scan the wave moving across the sky. So, if you have the night free, come on over. If you can't make it on Saturday, the spectacle should be happening for a couple weeks and the peak is usually about 15-30 minutes before sunset.

Scott Downes
downess at charter.net
Yakima WA