Windsor-Essex Christmas bird counters spot a rare blackbird — and a few different owls

Christmas bird counts in the Windsor-Essex and Chatham-Kent areas have so far turned up numerous owl sightings, a rare glimpse of a yellow-headed blackbird and a first-ever sighting of a sparrow common to the prairies.

One birder, who has taken part in four counts so far this year, has seen five different species of owl. Namely, he's seen the tiny northern saw-whet owl, the stern-looking long-eared owl, the short-eared owl, the eastern screech owl and the mighty great horned owl. 

"In Windsor-Essex, that's almost the most you could ask for, really," said Jeremy Bensette. He's been taking part in Christmas bird counts for about 13 years and will serve as the compiler for the Lakeshore event on Jan. 4.

"Even our two local owls can be tricky at times – the eastern screech owl and the great horned owl. It really depends on the weather. If it's a little bit rainy or particularly cold, all of a sudden, those owls might not be very active in the early morning or in the evening time."

The only other owl species a person might spot in the region is a snowy owl, said Bensette, who also operates a birding tours company called Pele Birding. And he did see one this year, just not during a bird count.

Christmas bird counts are taking place across the western hemisphere between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5.

The annual tradition dates back to 1900, when it was launched as a protest against an annual Christmas bird shoot, said Paul Pratt, the compiler for the Cedar Creek event, which kicked off this year's counts in Windsor-Essex on Dec. 14.

Volunteers fan out across more than 2,000 circular zones to count birds and record species in what's been described as North America's longest running citizen science project.

The results are used by conservation biologists, environmental planners and naturalists to assess the population trends and distribution of birds, according to Birds Canada.

The Cedar Creek count registered a total of around 19,000 birds of 82 different species, Pratt said -— a fairly typical number.

Bird populations changing over time

But Pratt, who has been involved with the Cedar Creek event since it launched 39 years ago, said he's noticed major changes in bird populations during that time.

"When I started doing bird counts, Lake Erie was frozen solid by the time the Christmas Bird Count season started," he said.

"And now all we ever see is, you know, maybe a little fringe of ice around the shoreline and sometimes the western basin will freeze up once you get maybe into January."

That means counts like the one in Point Pelee register a tremendous number of waterfowl, he said.

Some of the changes Pratt has seen over the years are encouraging, he added, including the increase in raptors such as Cooper's hawks, bald eagles and peregrine falcons.

But other species are disappearing. 

Bob-white quails used to be common in southwestern Ontario and are gone now due to loss of habitat, Pratt said.

The quails, meadow larks and other grassland birds have all declined in numbers due to the loss of pastures, meadows and other shrubby open fields, he said.

"When you drive around … it's either a wood lot you see, or it's a soybean field. … We don't pasture cattle anymore," he added.

That said, birders participating in the Cedar Creek count located a field of weedy grass that had gone to seed and spotted more than 1,000 birds in it, Pratt said, including a species nobody had ever seen before in the Cedar Creek count's history: the clay-coloured sparrow.

'My dream species'

"They're the common sort of field sparrow when you get out in southern Saskatchewan, southern Alberta," he said.

"We don't have any breeding in Essex County."

This year's bird counts in the Windsor-Essex area included one new one in Comber.

Volunteers counted 26,812 birds of 76 species, said compiler Jeremy Hatt, who also compiles the Holiday Beach count scheduled for Saturday.

That's far higher than the 60 or so species he had expected to count.

Hatt credits the cold weather for the unexpectedly good outcome saying the cold often drives birds to forest edges where they're easier to see.

Highlights for participants included seeing glaucous gulls, Iceland gulls, a snowy owl, several short-eared owls, and one particularly rare sighting.

"Early in the morning, I got a text from one of the volunteers that they had a male yellow-headed blackbird at a granary just north of Comber," Hatt said.

"And that was one of my kind of dream species for this town."