Goldfinch Gazette
The Newsletter of the Rockingham Bird Club
Volume XXXIII
JANUARY MEETING
DATE: Thursday, January 3, 2008
TIME: 7:00 PM
PLACE: Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community - Rt. 42 North, Harrisonburg, VA
PROGRAM: Our speaker will be John C. Whissel. He is a biologist and will speak to us about the Swan Research Program at Airlie in Warrenton, VA. We will have dinner at 5:00 PM at Pano's Family Restaurant, 3190 S. Main Street. Call Kay Gibson at 249-5287by 3:00 PM on Thursday if you are going to join the group.
January Field Trips -- Tom Mizell
Thursday, January 17 – Monthly Hillandale Park Walk - Meet at the parking lot at the children's playground at 8:30 AM for our first walk of 2008. Dress warmly and consider bringing something warm to drink as we may enjoy some midwinter treats after we complete our walk.
Proposed Change in Waterbird-Raptor Census Format - John Irvine, Coordinator
In 1997 Dr. Clyde Kessler, a birder and professor at Virginia Tech, proposed that since Christmas Counts had only 15 mile diameter circles and therefore missed a lot of good habitats, there ought to be a midwinter census of waterfowl covering all of each county in Virginia. Here in Rockingham we took him up on that, as did several other counties. Figuring that unlike a coastal plain county, for example, we didn’t really have enough waterfowl habitat to fully occupy our time in the field, we piggybacked raptors onto the count as well, and further expanded “waterfowl” to include birds that depended on water for their living: loons, grebes, herons, even kingfishers and snipe, for example. In about 3 years the enthusiasm for that census ran down in almost all the other counties and Dr. Kessler lost interest, but we had a good time doing it and kept on thanks to faithful regional leaders and their coworkers, and now we have a rough picture of waterbird and raptor numbers for late January in Rockingham County for nine successive years. (Note carefully that word “rough,” because it is important to what follows.) Census results have been published—cumulative results at that—a month or two later, each year, in the Goldfinch Gazette. But I don’t think any use has been made of the data in any scientific papers.
For 2007 the Hawk Migration Society of America (HMANA) designed a program they call Winter Raptor Surveys. Its purpose is “to get birders/raptor enthusiasts out in the field during the winter looking for diurnal raptors, and to provide those surveyors with a set of guidelines enabling them to record their observations in standardized format“ (emphasis mine). This is citizen science, science because it involves standardized format, not rough format such as we have been generating-- the kind of science that can carry weight in making political decisions (unless politicians downplay it, as some sadly have). Anyone who has been on a Breeding Bird Census will recognize this format. This wintertime program is being picked up in many parts of the country. To find out more about this program, go on the Web to www.hmana.org and click on “Winter Raptor Surveys.”
In this format teams of two or more persons go out and drive a line, mostly on back roads, 30 or more miles long and record every raptor they see along with certain data about it. The same route is used in succeeding months and years. More information can be found at the HMANA website.
I am proposing that we divorce the waterbird event to a field trip (or two) aimed just at them, and work at the raptor issue through the HMANA protocol on a different day--or days; it would be possible to run some of the routes on one day and others on another. The result would be a more responsible addition to the national raptor database, which we are not now making. Hopefully most of the people who would be interested in this will be at the January club meeting. I am suggesting that those people meet with me at the close of the meeting for a few minutes to answer questions and gauge the interest level.
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