Part family reunion. Part science trek. Part nature walk. Part techy.
Always slo-mo.
This is the once-a-year Great Backyard Bird Count held most recently Feb. 15. I’m the leader of the human flock and the chief accountant data nerd. My bird spotting skills are very average but I hang out with more talented people.
I know many of the dozen gathered in the Sheri Capehart parking lot. One family I hadn’t seen since last year (I think!). A newbie brought mom along. Plenty of gray-hairs among us. The skills run the gamut, but the enthusiasm is giggly infectious. What will the next two hours reveal?
We’re here in typical changeable February weather. Today is it light rain? Or heavy mist? Or granular fog? But it’s warm! 49 degrees!
The 60 acres of the preserve is a lot to cover, with a lot of local ecosystems. The more people we have the more areas we can cover. This year, we break in half – one group concentrating on the South Pond/Boardwalk area; the other the Big Pond and eastern half of the preserve.
We are armed with binoculars, cellphones equipped with the Merlin app and a bird guidebook or two. Off we go, ears and eyes cocked.
My group heads toward the Big Pond, across the “bridge to nowhere.” (Actually, it’s a bridge to cross an intermittent wetland seep that left the trail a soupy, muddy, impassable mess after the record North Texas rains of 2015-16).
Even before reaching the target-rich pond, we record our first count, a tufted titmouse. This is a regular at the preserve this time of year, spotted 16 of the 18 years we’ve been keeping records for the annual bird count. All is right with the world.
Shortly after we cross the narrow trail bridge over another seep (thank you, SouthPoint Constructors volunteers, for building this last year!).
At the top of the spillway LBJs appear (little brown jobs), flitting in the grasses at the edge. A Lincoln’s sparrow and a song sparrow! (A photo later helps verify the Lincoln’s ID using iNaturalist, the photo-recognition app)
Upon reaching the Big Pond, the scene is rich and complex. The pond is big and you can’t see it all at glance. Lots of birds to spot, but many are far away and even with binoculars, a bit tough to sort out. AND THEY’RE ALL MOVING. Egads!
So as citizen scientists we do the best we can. As we slowly walk from west to east, some of the birds paddle away from us. But Greg is on it. He counts 30 Northern shovelers by the end of the pond. That’s the most we’ve ever seen – but there are usually a lot. The variety of water birds is terrific – American wigeons, gadwalls, ring-necked ducks (who actually have a very visible ring on their bill tips – not their neck), lesser scaups, mallards, a pair of pied-billed grebes. A half-dozen domesticated geese hybrids. They shouldn’t be there but the south shore has gotten corrupted by lawnmowers from nearby residents. The shoreline strip is nature preserve property. Geese love lawns; they don’t love tall prairie grasses which SHOULD be there.
We can hear the belted kingfisher’s nasty squawk then finally find its perch 10 feet up a tree on the southeastern shore. A photo captures this big bird.
Nearby, we head inland, to a swampy area, a known hangout for redwing blackbirds. Greg figures there’s 36 in the flock. That man can count.
As we head north on the yellow trail we run into a hiker who wants to know what we’re up to. We give him the speech, our preserve business card and urge him to check out our website. He wants to volunteer to work on the trails, something the Friends of Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve are in charge of.
We also take a break to talk about Merlin technology. It’s a wonderful thing, identifying bird calls with surprising accuracy. You just have to screen out the birds that are clearly not seen at the preserve at this time (or ever). While eBird enthusiasts have spotted 167 species over the years at Sheri Capehart – a fraction of North American birds. And even many of those 167 are not here in February. The bird count generally tallies 20 to 45 species in two hours. We tally 41 this day, but there are at least 9 other species that have been recorded at Sheri Capehart on eBird this year we don’t encounter.
This new technology is also puzzling. Between our three cellphones, we don’t all capture the same birds. Gary’s phone, for some reason, records more species than the others. Greg even has a small screw-in microphone that on another phone improves reception a lot – but on this phone today not so much.
We trundle our way slowly back on the blue trail. Darn if we don’t see a fox squirrel disappear in a snag above the trail in a huge hole. Wonder how it got there? Woodpecker nest later remodeled by Sir Squirrel?
We soon arrive at the parking lot after about our mile or so stroll to meet up with the South Pond birding crew. I combine our tallies with Annabelle’s to be compiled in a ridiculously detailed spreadsheet that covers the last 18 years of counts.
For the record, our 41 species is tied for second most. The warm weather and lack of wind certainly helped. Lack of fishermen to scare away the ducks also helped.
Two new species were counted — a brown thrasher and a great horned owl. Records were also set for the most Carolina wrens (9). No hawks or vultures were spotted as they usually are, as light winds and the heavy fog dampened the updrafts they like.
We counted 205 birds in all, third most in 18 years.
Why do we do this? Our checklists help researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the National Audubon Society and Birds of Canada learn more about how birds are doing, and how to protect them and the environment we share.
We also join in a fellowship of citizen scientists worldwide. Last year 642,003 people from 210 countries joined the count.
According to this year’s preliminary tally, 8,012 species have been recorded worldwide as I write this. That’s good news: it’s already 92 higher than a year ago. The data are reported on eBird, the world’s largest biodiversity-related participatory science project.
God willing, most of us will be back in February 2026 to do it all again, meeting old and new friends along the way.
