Watching birds in December might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but birds have always somehow transported me out of the everyday world. So when a friend suggested that I take part in this year’s Christmas Bird Count, it struck me as a great idea. What could be more in tune with the season than looking for life â?? flocks of busy, feathered life â?? at the darkest time of the year?
The Christmas Bird Count began back in 1900 as a quiet form of protest against a traditional Christmas Day bird hunt. Today it’s an important exercise in citizen science, providing data that researchers can use to assess what’s happening to wild birds all across North America.
So, December notwithstanding, early one chilly morning near the solstice, I set out with two fellow birders to see what we could find in East Montpelier.
East Montpelier is one of the prettiest towns in Vermont â?? a classic farmed tapestry of rolling fields interwoven with forests and wandering brooks, studded here and there with farmhouses, barns and little villages. We drove uphill and down, skirting fields and stately sugarbushes, boring through dark stands of spruce, stopping when we saw birds, or places that looked like they should harbor birds. We almost always stopped when we saw a bird feeder, because we counted everything â?? chickadees, goldfinches, cardinals â?? whatever might be feeding there. And we did see a lot of birds. The Plainfield Christmas Bird Count, of which we were one three-person team, counted more than 1,300 chickadees!
Near a brushy brook we watched a flock of a dozen goldfinches sorting through the buds and seeds in a small alder thicket. The day was slightly overcast, but the finches glowed like burnished gold coins against the flat-white snow.
Wild turkeys, once exterminated from Vermont, are now almost a force of nature in East Montpelier â?? we counted 58 of them.
As we scanned one wooded clearing, a little blue-backed sharp-shinned hawk shot across it like a bullet, chasing a zigzagging chickadee. He missed, and then perched hungrily in a bare maple..
As we drove along an open hillside, we spotted a flock of 15 ducks – common mergansers â?? circling some fields downhill from us. They would circle and glide as though they were going to land, then circle again. Their coordinated flight created a shifting, graceful ovoid with 30 wings flashing white against the gray sky.
We didn’t see anything rare. But we captured a feeling that was rare â?? a sense that even in the year’s darkest days, even as winter deepens, the countryside around us is not dead, not really. It has simply shifted into a different mode, a waiting-and-renewal mode, part of the eternal cycle of life and death and rebirth that Christmas so aptly celebrates.
The message of the holiday season is true. Life is still there, deep in the dark and the cold of December. And the birds help reassure us that the land is still alive and the light will come back to us.