Counting birds on Nantucket

Bald eagle with its next meal. The species was one of those spotted in the Audubon Christmas Bird Count on Nantucket.

Text from an ecoRI News article

NANTUCKET, Mass. — The sharp, shrill call of a northern saw-whet owl was a welcome sound to the five people, including myself, standing on a soggy trail in the Nantucket State Forest at 5:45 on a chilly, drizzly December morning.

We had gone there specifically to hear the owl — we couldn’t see it, since the sun hadn’t quite risen yet — and log it for the 70th annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count on Nantucket. (If you can hear and identify a bird, you can count it, according to the rules.)

One of our team members for the count had suggested we meet before dawn and head to the state forest to see if we could hear the owl. She hung a small Bluetooth speaker on a tree limb and then played a recording of the owl’s calls. It didn’t respond to the first two, but when she played a third call, a sort of tooting sound, the owl replied. And kept tooting, as if it was delighted to hear a fellow owl.

It was an auspicious start to my first bird count, and it made me realize how seriously birders take the annual event, which has been taking place in the United States for more than 100 years.
Here’s the whole article.

Nantucket from a NASA satellite.