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Not even a worldwide pandemic could stop a group of intrepid birders from counting birds in Comstock and Del Rio for the annual Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count in December 2020.
Michael Gleason has been the count compiler for both counts for nearly 20 years, and he and I talked about what made the 2020 count different.
“We had fewer people, for starters, because of the pandemic. We knew we would be able to cover less ground, but we decided to proceed anyway,” he said.
For those of you who may not know, Michael G. is my husband, and he is currently living and working in San Antonio to care for his father. Christmas is a special time of year, but it’s especially important for us because it’s a time for us to spend several days together doing something we both love.
For the 2020 Count, several of our regular birders informed us they wouldn’t be making the trip to Del Rio to participate in the count because of the pandemic.
Mike told me that safety of the participants was his priority in 2020.
“We followed all of Audubon’s guidelines for a safe count, including no meetings outside our family ‘pods.’ Communication and information gathering was done by text and email,” Mike said.
For 2020, we welcomed only one out-of-town participant, Eva Fromme, of San Antonio.
Mike and I were a team, and Del Rioans Connie Hoke and her sister Cynthia Woodrow were another.
During the Comstock Count, the five of us tallied a total of 62 species, and we had two uncommon species not typically counted in Comstock, a Dark-eyed Junco found by Connie Hoke and a Sage Thrasher I found in the Seminole Canyon State Park.
There was some discussion early in the planning stages about canceling the count, but Mike said he quickly discarded the idea because of the importance of the event.
“The information gathered by count volunteers gives us a better understanding of what’s going on in the environment. Each count provides a small snapshot of a particular area, but when you look at the big picture, you see that everything is affected by everything else, everything interacts with everything around it,” Mike told me.
He said the information gathered by the thousands of count volunteers in hundreds of counts across the world also allows scientists to focus on the big picture.
“The data gathered by count volunteers gives us information about species declines, migration patterns and breeding habitats, all the way up to global factors like climate change and how that affects environments,” he said.
Next week: Surprising species found during Del Rio Count
