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 70^th 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.

A hunt becomes a count

Before the turn of the 20th century, hunters took part in a Christmas tradition known as a “side hunt.” Whoever brought in the most birds and animals won.

But even then some scientists and observers were becoming concerned about declining bird populations, according to the National Audubon Society. So, on Christmas Day in 1900, Frank M. Chapman, an ornithologist and officer in the what was then a fledgling Audubon Society, proposed a “Christmas bird census” during which birds would be counted, not hunted.

Thanks to Chapman and 27 dedicated birders, 25 Christmas bird counts were held on Dec. 25, 1900, in places ranging from Toronto, Canada, to Pacific Grove, Calif. Those original 27 counters tallied 18,500 individual birds and 89 species.

Today, Christmas bird counts across the country take place between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5., with the three days before and after the actual count day known as “count week,” during which species that may be missed on count day can be documented.

The data collected over the past century allow researchers, conservation biologists, wildlife agencies, and others to study the long-term health and status of bird populations across North America. When combined with other surveys, such as the Breeding Bird Survey, the Christmas count provides a picture of how the continent’s bird populations have changed over the past 100 years, said Charles Clarkson, director of avian research for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island.

“Long-term bird survey data are essential to our understanding of how bird populations are changing in response to the myriad threats they face,” Clarkson said. “Conservation work relies on long-term data sets, and surveys such as the Christmas Bird Count and Breeding Bird Survey are indispensable tools for our trade.”

Clarkson said because the annual bird count has been so consistent for so long, it’s a major tool helping biologists, scientists, and birders understand how bird populations are changing, both generally and in specific locations.

“To tease out the effects of multiple interacting factors on bird populations, it is necessary to sample that population over many years,” he wrote in an email to ecoRI News. “Standardizing your data collection efforts in both space and time is important (surveying over the same area for multiple years). By structuring your data collection with these things in mind, you can begin to understand how populations change over time and identify the primary drivers of that change.”

Pishing for birds

There’s a reason Nantucket is known as the “Grey Lady,” and she showed her namesake color on Dec. 29, the morning of the bird count. Our team had been assigned to a southern section of the island that included Surfside and Nobadeer, and our next stop was at the latter beach, where we were to look for ducks, gulls, and other waterfowl. But the fog hanging over the water made that impossible.

That didn’t stop Jacquelyn Papale, a self-described birding “fanatic” and co-captain of our team, who had agreed to show the novice birders (my friend Lynne DeLucia and myself) the ropes. She merely turned away from the shore, walked a few feet along the sandy road, made a “sssssppssspp” sound — known in the birding world as pishing — and then watched in satisfaction as a number of tiny birds flew out of the coastal heathland across the road from the beach.

Although I could barely see them, even with binoculars, she quickly identified them as yellow-rumped warblers, or “rumps,” so named because of their bright yellow backsides. The bird’s ability to digest the waxes in some berries allows it to winter further north than other warblers, and they proved to be the most common bird, along with the song sparrow, that we encountered during the count.

We then got into our cars and drove slowly along the pot-holed dirt road, Lynne and I following behind as Papale pished out her window to lure the birds into view. It was easy to see when Papale spotted a bird she found interesting, as her car would come to a halt and she’d whip her binoculars around to better see the bird she’d spotted.

We were supposed to log all the birds we saw on eBird, an app created by Cornell University (which also created the popular Merlin bird ID app) that identifies where the user is, lists the birds that are likely to be found in that area, and compiles checklists that can be shared by other users. And since it was a bird count, we had to count all of the types of birds we saw; for instance, if we saw two chickadees, we had to list two chickadees. If we saw 10 rumps, we had to list 10 rumps.

But juggling binoculars, regular glasses, reading glasses, and my phone proved tricky. I later learned that most birders keep a pad and pen handy and just scribble down the birds they see, entering them into the app later.

The Nantucket birders also communicated by text. Papale would glance down at her phone and then say things like “So and so just saw a pheobe,” as though Lynne and I would know exactly what she was talking about. (We mostly didn’t. In that case, she was talking about the eastern pheobe, a small bird described by Merlin as “a drab, medium-sized flycatcher.”)

When she spotted a couple of eastern bluebirds, an unusual sight on the island at this time of year, other birders quickly asked her where she’d seen them so they could add them to their lists. In addition to checklists, eBird also allows birders to track species for their “life list,” a record some birders keep of all the species they’ve seen over their lifetime. Because each team was assigned to a particular section of the island for the Christmas count, we could only report which birds were spotted in our section.

Data from the annual bird count is vital in helping the Audubon Society predict how climate change could affect North America’s birds. A 2014 report that studied 588 species predicted that more than half are likely to be in trouble, and it predicted that 314 species will lose more than 50% of their current climatic range by 2080.

In Rhode Island, according to a 2023 report by the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, more than a third of bird populations — from wood thrushes to common grackles — studied on the organization’s 3,338 acres of refuges are declining. Only a quarter of the bird species are showing long-term increases in population, according to The State of Our Birds, Part 1.

One of the birds most vulnerable to climate change is the saltmarsh sparrow, according to the report, which calls the small, brown-speckled bird the “poster child” of how changes in habitat can affect populations. Experts project the saltmarsh sparrow will be extinct by 2050.

The birds are salt marsh specialists, living in higher marsh elevations and building their nests at a particular height in the marsh grass — high enough to avoid damaging nest flooding, but low enough to be out of sight of predators. They have evolved to be able to handle the regular ebb and flow of tides, with chicks learning to climb the marsh grass during high tides, and mothers returning to sit on and warm the eggs after a high tide has dampened them.

But just an inch or so of sea level rise will decimate these birds, washing away the eggs and forcing the birds to build their nests higher in the grass, which will expose them to predators.

Two missed falcons

When the fog finally lifted, at around 10:30 a.m., we headed back to the beach to look for waterfowl. Standing on the shore and looking at the water with the naked eye, it seemed as though there was nothing there. But looking through my binoculars, I saw that, in fact, the water was busy with birds. Common loons and ducks such as the common eider bobbed and dipped in the swells, undeterred by the rain and wind. It was astonishing to see that what looked like an empty expanse of water was actually teeming with life.

Our next stop was the backside of the Nantucket Municipal Airport, where Papale said hawks were known to hang out. A first pass with our binoculars didn’t yield much, so Lynne and I decided to head to her house nearby for a bathroom break. When we reunited with Papale, she’d seen a kestrel and a merlin, two small species of falcon that I would have loved to add to my life list.

In addition to the teams roaming the island, there were also 12 dedicated “feeder watchers,” according to Libby Buck, a conservation scientist and land steward at the Linda Loring Nature Foundation who compiled Nantucket’s Christmas count.

In all, 78 volunteers counted 138 species and 40,601 individual birds, Buck wrote in a story about the count in the Nantucket Current.

Some of the unusual species spotted on the island included a clapper rail, clay-colored sparrow, American oystercatcher, willet, black-headed gull, and a tufted duck, according to Buck.

But the bird that generated the most excitement was a snowy owl, spotted at a hard-to-get-to location on the northern tip of the island. Those who tried to get a peek at the owl were urged to keep their distance and use binoculars or spotting scopes to view the bird.

The National Audubon Society keeps track of all the bird counts in one place, and the data can be broken down by species or count locations.

For example, I searched for data on the American black duck in Nantucket from 2018-23. It showed that in that period, the species declined from a high of 1,058 in 2019 to 374 in 2023 (data for the 2024 count had not been added to the official site yet). That tracks with the duck’s decline in North America, Clarkson said.

“This is a species that has declined steeply across its entire North American range (29.7% decline from 2011 – 2021), and the population in the Nantucket count mirrors this decline,” he said.

Other species, Clarkson said, such as the tufted titmouse, have experienced a slight population increase over time, “both at the count-circle level as well as the larger scale of their North American range,” he said.

Remembering a ‘birder extraordinaire’

In late afternoon, as the skies cleared and the sun came out, some of the birders gathered at what was intriguingly described as “Edie’s Rock.”

It turned out to be much more than a mere rock. As Papale explained, the memorial boulder was placed in a field on the edge of a marsh not far from the home of the late Edith Dillon Ray, also known as Edie, who, according to her obituary, was “never without her binoculars, was a shorebird person, delighting in the activities of piping plovers, oystercatchers, sea ducks and all manner of avian wildlife … with the occasional seal in the living room, goose in the bathtub, and birds in the freezer.”

After Ray died on Dec. 27, 2023, at 69, friends and family raised money for the memorial stone, carved with the words “birder extraordinaire.” A divot in the stone catches water when it rains and was left there on purpose, Papale said, to provide drinking and bathing water for the birds Ray so dearly loved.

Although weary after hours of squinting through binoculars or spotting scopes, the birders gathered at Edie’s Rock were still excited to recount the birds they’d seen, or not seen.

Later, at the end of a very long day, the birders gathered at 7 p.m. for a potluck dinner and to read out the official counts from all the teams.

Buck noted a few birds were noticeably absent from the 2024 count, including ring-necked pheasants, wood ducks, brown-headed cowbirds, hairy woodpeckers, brown thrashers, glaucous gulls, and yellow-breasted chats.