Bird count numbers shrouded by fog

YAKIMA, Wash. — At the soup-and-cocoa gathering at the end of last weekend’s two-day Christmas Bird Count, the assembled volunteers bantered about what were the worst possible conditions for the event that the Yakima Valley Audubon Society has put on for the last 27 years.

A great horned owl peers out from a tree during the Toppenish Christmas Bird Count last December. The photographer saw what he was convinced was the same owl in the very same tree on Sunday during this year’s bird count, but heavy fog and poor light made photographing it problematic. (Photo courtesy of DENNY GRANSTRAND)

Wind? Snow? Blizzards? Pouring rain? Naaah.

The easy winner by acclamation was precisely was hampered this latest count: fog.

“Our counts of hawks and ducks were way, way down,” said Andy Stepniewski, who headed up Sunday’s Toppenish count in the Lower Valley. “Definitely a dearth of hawks and raptors — we couldn’t see them. Counts were roughly half of normal in Toppenish. We’re used to a certain number of red-tails and eagles.”

The Toppenish volunteers chronicled roughly 12,500 total birds, barely over half the average of just over 20,000 over the last 27 years. “And I think the birds were out there,” Stepniewski said.

“You just couldn’t see them.”

The numbers weren’t down significantly on Saturday’s Yakima count, with 23,153 total birds counted, actually above the average of about 22,000 since the mid-1980s. But that was a bit misleading for two reasons, according Yakima organizer Denny Granstrand. One, there were 26 volunteers, a bigger number than usual, and two, huge flocks of brown-headed cowbirds, red-winged blackbirds and starlings in Selah bumped up the total.

Still, Granstrand noted, the 82 species counted in Yakima were only barely below the annual average of just over 83, not bad considering the conditions.

“I would think the big story was the fog and the ice,” Granstrand said. “We had the combination of the heavy fog and most of the ponds and lakes being frozen over, and the (Yakima) river being mostly frozen over. The combination of those two things dropped our waterfowl numbers and raptor numbers down quite a bit.

“And things like common ravens — that number was really low, the lowest since 1999. With the spotting scopes we have now, we can identify a raven flying a mile away, and if we saw a golden eagle almost two miles away with good light, we could identify it. But those kinds of birds we just couldn’t see because of the fog.”

Notable sightings included a Harris’ sparrow and a grackle, two species only rarely seen west of the Rockies. In addition, the numbers of Eurasian collared-doves and western scrub-jays, species that are expanding their ranges and have become relatively new residents in Yakima County, were at their highest totals ever in the Christmas count.