On a frosty morning in Bozeman Andrew Guttenberg and Josh Covill drive around the city’s north end, their eyes to the sky.
They’re volunteering with the local Bozeman chapter of the Audubon Society on the Christmas Bird Count. It’s the 124th year of a bird surveying effort, happening across Montana, and the world. From December 14 to January 5, birders across the Americas spend a day counting all the birds they can see and hear.
<<pishing sound>>
Many birders, like Guttenberg and Covill, rely on pish-ing, a common practice to mimic the alarm calls smaller birds make when they spot a predator like a hawk.
“If you make that noise. It will elicit a response from a bird that's hidden deep in the bush like Song Sparrows especially,” Gutenberg said.
This is Guttenberg’s 15th year doing the count in Bozeman. In a warm winter like this one, he says they may see fewer birds.
“And also the lack of cold means that a lot of birds are still farther north and haven’t come down here yet,” Gutenberg said.
The long-term monitoring data collected from these surveys provides valuable information on bird movement. Long-term datasets like the Christmas Bird Count have shown that more than half of US bird species are declining.
And in places that are growing fast, like Bozeman, the Christmas Bird Count documents how urbanization is changing where birds are found. Covill and Guttenberg point to new subdivisions as they drive.
“Birds that use the agricultural fields like northern Harriers, things like that, those are kind of suffering,” Guttenberg said.
“Things like that get pushed out to the farm fields. And then the farm fields turn into a subdivision,” Josh Covill said.
Before the day was done they spotted a few gray partridges. In a field, rather than a pear tree.
