Pine Siskins and Kestrels: What the Annual Christmas Count Says about Birds and Their Environment
County birders spent Thursday tallying birds and species of birds for the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. They ponder what the totals mean for habitat and climate.
PISGAH FOREST — Add one more outdoor attraction to the area’s roster of spectacular waterfalls, mountain trails and trout streams: a holding pond at the notoriously polluted former site of the Ecusta Mill paper plant.
It’s one of the best birding spots around, said Michael Plauche, the Transylvania County Bird Club member assigned to monitor the pond near Old Hendersonville Highway for Thursday’s annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count.
He offered a look through his scope after training it on a bald eagle perched high in a pine and silhouetted by the rising sun.
“That’s really cool, even though it just looks like a big blackbird in this light,” he said.
The 70-acre pond is the site of the only known great blue heron rookery in Western North Carolina, he said, while working from his own perch, a tiny, elevated porch overlooking the water at the neighboring Calvary Baptist Mission Church.
He scoped out nearly a dozen of the large, hunched birds roosting on rusted girders on the pond’s opposite bank and, to their right, a pair that had separated themselves from the flock to spread their wings and engage in a ritualistic strut.
“They’re doing kind of a little mating dance over on the berm,” he said.
A naked, untrained eye could pick out several black objects floating in the dark water, creating ripples that caught the gold of the low sun.
Plauche, 44, who is acknowledged as the club’s most active and knowledgeable birder — “He’s our leader, whether formally or informally,” said member Linda Threatte — identified them as ducks, and started calling out their species and their numbers.
“At the moment there are probably 15 buffleheads and probably 100 hooded mergansers,” he said, scanning the pond’s surface with binoculars.
“Four gadwalls just flew in front and center,” he added, sounding excited, as he pointed out the cluster of gray, unusually sleek birds with black rumps.
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Citizen Science
So, as with so many other birding “games,” keeping score is part of what the count is all about, Plauche said.
Local Audubon groups and other birding clubs across the country tally as many species and individual birds as possible on one day either shortly before or after Christmas.
But the count is also one of the nation’s biggest and oldest exercises in citizen science. Sometimes called a “census,” it has generated statistics dating back to 1900, when it was inaugurated as an alternative to then-prevalent holiday bird hunts.
The resulting database allows birders to track the ups and downs of bird populations and often prompts them to try to pinpoint causes. These can be long-term environmental changes, such as habitat loss, or short-term variables, including the fortuitous cold front that blew through during the 2020 count, forcing migratory birds south and allowing a record tally of 84 species.
But this number was also boosted by concerning factors, including the disruptions in the production of the the pine siskin’s favorite food source — evergreen cones in northern forests. The bird’s appearance for last year’s count, Plauche said, was probably the result of a desperate search for nutrition.
Generally, he said, the club has counted fewer ducks in recent years, because more of them can remain to forage in ice-free waters farther north. And he sees fewer insect-eating birds simply because “there are fewer insects,” he said.
“Everybody’s alarmed about bees but the same thing is happening across the board. Anybody who stops and thinks about it can remember how many more bugs they used to have to scrape off their windshields.”
This loss may be one factor in the shrinking numbers of American kestrels, a small hawk with a varied diet that includes grasshoppers and crickets, Plauche said, and “is known to be a species in decline.”
He failed to see one at the pond or in the surrounding neighborhood, where club members have the permission of several property owners, including the church, to set up scopes and search for birds.
He did, however, begin to accumulate sightings of songbirds — cardinals, bluebirds, ruby- and golden-crowned kinglets, song sparrows and Savannah sparrows.
Some he spied from a distance. Others he stirred up by approaching tangles of gray, leafless weeds and imitating a predator’s vibrato whistle so convincingly that the bird-call app on his phone identified him as a screech owl.
He saw a Cooper’s hawk from his posting at the church and a close relative, the sharp-shinned hawk, on a short walk up a densely wooded old railbed off Davidson River Road.
“We’re not doing bad for raptors,” he said, though he noted he was still missing the kestrel and peregrine falcon, whose rebound from near extinction in the 1970s is a well-known environmental success story.
“The charismatic birds that everybody knows about, they tend to be doing well,” Plauche said. “I think it just demonstrates that if people put an effort into conserving things, it works.”
A search of a weedy ditch in a sod field off Everett Road yielded not a single new species. “Brutal,” he said, before returning to his compact Suburu SUV in search of American pipits in a corn field off Cascade Lake Road.
The straw-colored birds were at first invisible, but his scope revealed a teeming population working the ground between the rows of stubble. He counted 85, he said, “probably a conservative estimate.”
He checked back at the pond in late morning, promising at least a rough count by evening, when about a dozen members of the club were scheduled to meet at the Oskar Blues brewery to report their results.
They repaired to a quiet, upstairs taproom. Plauche, who works as a bartender at the brewery on evenings and weekends — as well as serving as a part-time guide for Asheville’s Venture Birding Tours — sat at a dark wooden table with a legal pad to list the findings.
The day’s calm, mild weather didn’t leave them hopeful, and members reported missing some species usually seen at the pond’s main rival as the county’s best birding spot, a once-bushy pasture off the Estatoe bike path near Ecusta Road.
Birders call it “hospital fields,” but it’s now known as the Brooksville Dog Park, and its recently cleared lawn works better for pets than wild birds, Plauche said.
He called out the names of birds that members knew they would be lucky to see, including the pine siskin and another cone-feeding specialist, the red crossbill.
In both cases, he was answered by a chorus of “no”s from around the table.
Nobody had seen a swan of any description. “Bummer,” said member Frank Porter.
Nor was there a sighting of the more common ring-necked duck.
“Ugh,” Porter groaned. “That’s a big miss.”
The list did climb to 70 — with the possibility of more to come when all members’ reports are compiled — thanks partly to the peregrine falcon that Plauche had spotted on one of his return trips to the pond.
And, at a nearby farm, he had finally spied a kestrel, he said.
“We missed that one a couple of years ago, and it really hurt my heart.”
Nice article! I wish I'd been able to participate in the CBC, but I should go check the kestrel box that Michael gave me for a farm up the road.