North Central Illinois Ornithological Society

The Rockford CBC is Saturday, December 19.

The Kishwaukee CBC is Sunday, December 27.

The Rock Cut CBC is Sunday, January 3.

If you haven’t signed up for one or all of these counts, please contact Dan or Barbara Williams for Rockford or Kishwaukee and Eddie Callaway for Rock Cut. If you want to watch your feeder, please contact us to see if your house/feeder is within one of our count circles. We’ll send you a form.
Thank you for your help.

Six inches of soggy snow, lots of ice, persistent rain and heavy fog created some really challenging conditions. Both the birds and the birders would have rather been somewhere else. The low total of 52 species and the exceptionally low total of 6982 individual birds are certainly due to the weather. The average number of species for the last ten years is 64. The average number of individual birds for the last ten years is 24,452.
I give great credit to all of you who went out and counted. We spent about a normal amount of time in the field although a higher-than-normal percentage was spent in vehicles rather than on foot. I’m sure we set a new count record for the number of hours spent under umbrellas.
32 counters participated in the field, plus 5 feeder watchers. 3 parties went out early or late to look for owls.
We broke old the old count record of 22 Common Mergansers with a big flock by the 15th Ave. bridge and smaller groups scattered down the river totaling 93. New count records were set by small margins for Eastern Bluebird with 14 and Yellow-bellied Sapsucker with 3.
A huge thanks to all of you for your time and effort. This was the 19th year of the Kishwaukee count. You can see the results of this count, and all of the others, at the National Audubon Society’s website at http://www.audubon.org/bird/cbc. The dates for the Rockford and Kishwaukee counts in Dec 2009 will be the 19th and the 27th. I hope you can join us for some better weather.
Here’s the list of birds we found:

1204 Canada Goose
191 Mallard
16 Common Goldeneye
93 Common Merganser
9 Ring-necked Pheasant
8 Wild Turkey
1 Great Blue Heron
6 Bald Eagle (4 ad, 2 imm)
3 Cooper’s Hawk
21 Red-tailed Hawk
5 American Kestrel
1 Merlin
1 Peregrine Falcon
11 Herring Gull
372 Rock Pigeon
297 Mourning Dove
2 Eastern Screech- Owl
1 Great Horned Owl
3 Belted Kingfisher
61 Red-bellied Woodpecker
3 Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
82 Downy Woodpecker
20 Hairy Woodpecker
15 Northern Flicker
125 Blue Jay
366 American Crow
37 Horned Lark
280 Black-capped Chickadee
32 Tufted Titmouse
2 Red-breasted Nuthatch
97 White-breasted Nuthatch
53 Brown Creeper
3 Carolina Wren
1 Winter Wren
6 Golden-crowned Kinglet
14 Eastern Bluebird
33 American Robin
1207 European Starling
117 Cedar Waxwing
136 American Tree Sparrow
1 Fox Sparrow
19 Song Sparrow
20 White-throated Sparrow
6 White-crowned Sparrow
661 Dark-eyed Junco
2 Lapland Longspur
290 Northern Cardinal
8 Purple Finch
100 House Finch
73 Pine Siskin
282 American Goldfinch
585 House Sparrow

Here are the results from the very first (of hopefully many) Rock Cut Christmas Bird Counts!

We had 19 counters and like the other two area counts, crummy weather.

The List:

• Cackling Goose – 16
• Canada Goose – 7,457
• American Black Duck – 15
• Mallard – 806
• duck sp. – 1
• Common Merganser – 2
• Wild Turkey – 49
• Great Blue Heron – 2
• Bald Eagle – 1 (adult)
• Northern Harrier – 1
• Sharp-shinned Hawk – cw [could not relocate the one I found the day before]
• Cooper’s Hawk – 5
• Red-tailed Hawk – 31
• American Kestrel – 6
• Ring-billed Gull – 39
• Herring Gull – 16
• Rock Pigeon – 65
• Mourning Dove – 106
• Belted Kingfisher – 1
• Red-bellied Woodpecker – 34
• Downy Woodpecker – 54
• Hairy Woodpecker – 12
• Northern Flicker – 7
• NORTHERN SHRIKE – 4
• Blue Jay – 44
• American Crow – 277
• Horned Lark – 2
• Black-capped Chickadee – 154
• Tufted Titmouse – 10
• Red-breasted Nuthatch – 2
• White-breasted Nuthatch – 32
• Brown Creeper – 21
• Eastern Bluebird – 1
• Hermit Thrush – 1
• American Robin – 20
• European Starling – 1,219
• Cedar Waxwing – 331
• Yellow-rumped Warbler – 3
• American Tree Sparrow – 123
• Song Sparrow – 4
• Swamp Sparrow – 1
• White-throated Sparrow – 4
• Dark-eyed Junco – 336
• Lapland Longspur – cw
• Northern Cardinal – 135
• House Finch – 47
• Pine Siskin – 26
• American Goldfinch – 140
• House Sparrow – 289

TOTAL: 11,952 birds
SPECIES: 47

The final reports have been received. The Rockford Count recorded 73 species, plus 2 count week, with a total of 18858 individual birds on count day. I am grateful to everyone who volunteered their time and gasoline to go out into the snow and count birds. I am especially impressed by the team that was out on cross-country skis for 18.5 miles and 15.5 hours!

The deep snow kept a lot of birds around feeders or in sheltered spots, so getting to those places was important. This year, we had 10 feeder watchers, a new count high, which really helped. The feeders produced a lot of birds.

Some highlights: 21 Bald Eagles (8 adults, 13 immatures of various ages), a new count high. 1 Merlin, always rare here in winter, 2 Chipping Sparrows at the Brown feeder (they have been there for around 10 days including count day and were photographed and documented by Joyce), 1 Savannah Sparrow, 2 Carolina Wrens, 7 Winter Wrens (a new count high total), 257 Downy Woodpeckers (new count high), 110 Brown Creepers (new count high), and 806 House Finches (a new count high and probably a new state high, since Rockford held the previous record with 720).

Other species of note: 1 N. Bobwhite, 16 Cooper’s Hawks (quite a few buzzing feeders), 20 Great Horned Owls, 2 Yellow-rumped Warblers, 1 Hermit Thrush, 1 Common Grackle (feeder), 1 Rusty Blackbird, 2 White-crowned Sparrows (1 at feeder), 101 Snow Buntings, 5 Lapland Longspurs, 7 Fox Sparrows (3 at one feeder), 1 Hermit Thrush, 24 E. Bluebirds, 4 Northern Shrikes, 5 Pileated Woodpeckers, 1 Red-headed Woodpecker, 3 Cackling Geese (goose numbers were way down this year, almost certainly because the deep snow forced them to move to places where the snow wasn’t so deep and the water wasn’t frozen), 9 Common Goldeneye and 21 Common Mergansers (both species in the rivers), 1 Killdeer, 4 Wilson’s Snipe, and 89 American Robins (not nearly a count high).

Some folks expressed surprise at seeing a Robin in this snow and cold, but they will stick around as long as they have food and water. The food is essentially fruits on old crabapple, buckthorn and hackberry trees.

Count week birds were 3 Trumpeter Swans seen by Martin Kehoe and an Eastern Towhee, also at the feeder of Bill and Joyce Brown, which was seen on Friday the 19th but not on Saturday the 20th.

Happy New Year!

The day isn’t over yet, but I can safely say that this has been some of the worst weather for finding birds that I’ve ever seen on a CBC. Many, many thanks to all of you who went out and counted. If the rain slacks off Dan and I will probably get out again late in the day, but the steady rain and dense fog make for tough bird-finding. Of note was a Peregrine Falcon perched in a large oak between the park drive and the bank of the Rock River in Blackhawk Park. It may sit there until the weather improves if anyone wants to go look.

Barbara

I don’t need to repeat the weather report for you. Miserable, followed by a lot of snow. Nevertheless, almost 40 people went out and counted birds, and we are very grateful to them for their effort.

I have not yet received 2 field team reports and 6-8 feeder reports, but, so far, the CBC has recorded 71 species, quite a remarkable total. Highlights are Merlin, Chipping and Savannah Sparrows, 4 species of blackbirds, Hermit Thrush, E. Bluebirds, Killdeer, and a plethora of Bald Eagles and Winter Wrens (there is the big and small of it!).

I expect that the Count will exceed its high count with several species. Despite the deep snow and cold weather, the counters found a remarkable number of passerines, no doubt trapped by the weather. They were almost all at feeders or in sheltered areas with open water. One team managed to survey a great deal of its territory on cross-country skis!!

Thank you to everyone who participated. I will post the final totals when I receive all of the reports. You will also be able to find them in the Sinnissippi Audubon newsletter and, maybe, in the Rockford Register Star.

Last year Jennifer Outcalt and I (along with a few others and help from the banding station) spent three consecutive days trying to find as many species as possible in Winnebago County. While we could no way bird for 72 straight hours, the goal was and is again to bird as many hours as possible during those 72 hours.

While Jennie and I will be hitting many of the area’s top birding spots, we could certainly use some help especially to nab some of the “trickier” birds or rare birds. With dozens of miles of trails to cover and many miles of roads to get there, we will not have enough time for many of the forest preserves and other birdy areas.

So, if you’d wish to help out, email me for details — birdfreak [at] birdfreak.com — or just record any birds you see during the three days and email them to me.

DATES: Friday, May 23rd through Sunday, May 25th
LOCATION: Anywhere within Winnebago County
GOAL: Species, not number of birds – 150

We are only counting species so this is a little less intense than the Spring Bird Count and doesn’t require the paperwork. I’ll post the final list on NCIOS as well as http://birdfreak.com.

We (my dad and I) had Moody Marsh for the Crane Count and were not disappointed with cranes. We had 13 cranes calling, 6 doing the unison call, and a flock of 21 flying over. (Later we counted ~40 in same place as Larry Balch).

Other birds at our count area: 2 Soras, 2 American Bitterns, tons of pheasants, Bufflehead, Hooded Merganser, Ring-necked Duck, Wood Duck, Northern Shoveler, Ruddy Duck, and 80+ Blue-winged Teal. (Most of the ducks were in the flooded fields along Moody Rd).

Afterwards we headed to Sugar River Forest Preserve where we had a singing YELLOW-THROATED WARBLER and 9 Pine Warblers. A couple Brown Thrashers, & Eastern Towhee.

At home in the yard we had a Brown Thrasher and a House Wren to bring our total day species total to 60.

Update:

Some Photos

1. Yellow-throated Warbler
2. Pine Warbler
3. Chipping Sparrow
4. Moody Marsh
5. Nygren Wetlands

The Great Backyard Bird Count is this weekend and any sightings can be submitted easily on the GBBC website.

This is a great citizen science project that helps determine how birds are doing all over the country. You can count birds anywhere, not just your backyard!! Sightings can be submitted anytime for each of the four days.