Saint John's Christmas Bird Count data now in online database

An online database is now home to 70 years worth of data from the Saint John region's annual Christmas Bird Count.

And Don MacPhail, the provincial compiler for the project, said it wasn't an easy feat. 

Saint Johners have counted 600,000 birds over the years — and 181 different species.

"One of the biggest mistakes of my life probably was asking where all the data was, because people kind of said, 'Well, I think it's all in the New Brunswick Museum someplace,' and it kind of was," he said in an interview.

"It was a bit of effort to go and track all these things down. It's almost like they were all stuffed in a shoe box somewhere."

The first Christmas Bird Count was held on Christmas Day in 1900 and is now North America's longest-running citizen science project.

According to Birds Canada, which oversees the project nationally, people in more than 2,000 locations throughout the Western Hemisphere participate each year on a day between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5.

The project involves many volunteers in many countries who go out for one day over a 24-hour period to count birds, organized by the local compiler.

In New Brunswick, MacPhail said the count didn't really take off widely until the 1950s.

"Within a few years, the province was pretty well covered, right from Île Miscou to Edmundston in the north and Grand Manan to Sackville in the south," he said.

"It's never really looked back. It built up to 45 or 50 different regions being surveyed every year."

MacPhail said his first time participating in a Christmas Bird Count was probably around 1975 in Montreal, but his first New Brunswick count was in 2009.

When MacPhail started going through the shoe boxes of journals and files, it wasn't all that useful because data was tough to extract from that.

But lo and behold, while MacPhail was looking through what the former provincial compiler of 40 years had sent him, he found Excel spreadsheets with all of the data digitized up to the year 2000.

MacPhail added the next 23 years to that, and he'll be running a workshop at Rockwood Park on Sunday to show people how to use the data.

He said this is the first time the Saint John data has been put together in this format, so he hasn't really started looking at any major trends, though a few things stand out.

For instance, MacPhail said, there's weather data that shows the coldest count day in Saint John was 1989 at -22 C and the warmest was nine years later at 4 C. 

Some of the species that have been counted in New Brunswick are anomalies of sorts, said MacPhail. They'll be seen once and never again.

But the data also shows when certain species have made their way into New Brunswick and how they've stuck around.

"People recognize the cardinal, the red cardinal, that's come in here recently, and you can really see in the data when it started to arrive," MacPhail said.

"You see one or two, and then it builds up to the, I think we've seen 50 or 80 of them in a year sometimes now. And those have become permanent residents here."

Gulls are the main group of birds spotted, said MacPhail, and they include the Iceland gull, which comes for the "mild" New Brunswick winters and leaves by March. 

But then there are the birds that are typically thought of as spring or summer birds, such as robins, where the number reported in a given year will depend on temperature and food supply.

"Of the 70 counts, the robins have been seen on 65 of them," MacPhail said. 

"A few years there were none, couple of years there's two or three or four, and then there were a few years there were three or 400 of them."