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AUSTIN: Every winter dozens of birders flock to areas in Southern Maryland to take an inventory of their flying feathered friends. But Baseball had just returned to Joplin after a three-year absence, the last of the two city’s fire horses were retired and the city assumed operation of Schifferdecker Park.
Perhaps less notably in 1914, a few birders quietly set out for the area’s first Christmas Bird Count — a count that had started 14 years earlier at the national level.
The Joplin group counted 15 species and 900 total birds; 800 of them were juncos.
On Saturday, the tradition will continue with a Joplin count, and in coming weeks with Southeast Kansas counts, as part of what’s now the largest resident science project in the U.S. and the largest wildlife survey in the world.
The data the groups collect each year is important, noted Chris Pistole, a birder and educator at Wildcat Glades Conservation & Audubon Center, because it helps paint for ornithologists a picture of the health of bird populations, how they have changed over time, and it helps guide conservation action.
