Keeping an eye on feathered friends

Audobon Society says sea birds are a barometer of the Puget Sound’s health

Susan Schell

of the Gateway

The tugboat, “Joe,” cuts through the waters of the Tacoma Narrows while the silhouettes of the two Narrows bridges loom in the distance. The early morning sun casts a pinkish-orange hue on the snow that clings to the cliffs and rooftops of houses on the shore. Two men stand on each side of Joe’s cabin clutching binoculars and scanning the waves for signs of life. Joe’s approach disturbs a flock of seagulls, which take to wing.

“Six mew gulls,” says Charlie Wright, catching the birds in his specs. A petite blonde woman seated at the galley table quickly makes a note of it on a clipboard.

These gulls have no idea how important they are on this day. They have just been recorded in the Audobon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count, which has grown to global proportions, including countries in the Caribbean, Central America, South America, Mexico and the Pacific Islands also participating alongside the United States and Canada.

Any feathered creature walking, flying, swimming or diving is counted.

The timing stems from the pre-turn-of-the-century Christmas “side hunt,” during which teams would choose sides and hunt everything they saw. The team with the biggest cache of birds and other animals won.

At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists grew concerned over declining bird populations. Ornithologist Frank Chapman, an early officer with the budding Audobon Society, proposed a new holiday tradition, a “Christmas Bird Census,” where people would count birds instead of hunting them.

Now the bragging rights come in the form of a glossy magazine that the Audobon Society publishes annually for each bird count, documenting the whos, whats and wheres of the count on a huge list of the top numbers of species and where they fall on the globe.

“It always happens either two weeks before or two weeks after Christmas,” said Faye Hands, count coordinator for the Pierce County CBC. “Each count is competing against each other. Last year, Costa Rica had the top number of species. Our chapter has got the highest number of horned grebes of any other in the U.S.”

The Tacoma-Gig Harbor count made the grade in the 2006-07 issue of CBC with the distinction of having the highest number of Thayer’s gulls — 762. The list is proudly marked with yellow highlighter in Hands’ 107th CBC edition.

In the beginning stages, one of the main uses of the CBC was to monitor the wintering bird populations in Canada by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Now the CBC has emerged as an important database of information used by a multitude of scientific organizations, like the National Oceanography Association.

“The information gathered is public domain for scientists,” Hands said. “One of the most important things is to look for trends. If something is unusual, they would have wondered what’s going on in the water. The birds are the canary in the coal mine. There is a certain standard number of birds we expect to see. If there’s an increase or decrease, there could be something important going on, and this is our first notification.

“The last two years, we have been having a problem in declines with water birds.”

The Audobon Society writes that bird populations can indicate habitat fragmentation or signal an immediate environmental threat, like groundwater contamination. The data also can be used to track anomalies, like Hurricane Katrina, which had a devastating affect on bird populations.

“They are a great indicator for the whole ecosystem,” bird counter Charlie Wright said. “It’s a really good way to monitor the health of the water.”

Wright said sea birds are important indicators because they follow the fish populations.

“They follow the herring and other small fish,” he said. “We don’t know how they do it, they just do.”

Wright, like the others on the boat, is a veteran bird counter. At 20, he said he’s participated in the CBC since 1999.

“Some of my earliest memories are of birds,” he said. “I have some notes from when I was 6. The first time I went birding outside my yard was at Nisqually, and it just kind’ve grew from there. I first hooked up with the Audobon Society when I was 10 or 11. Pretty soon, I was learning things pretty quickly. Within a couple years, I was co-leading field trips.”

Wright met Bruce LaBar, the other bird counter on board, years ago.

“Bruce has been a friend of mine for a long time,” Wright said.

LaBar is an old pro at the bird count, and this was Hands’ 12th year as coordinator. Even the tugboat captain, Robin Paterson, has hosted the CBC for years.

“It’s fun,” Paterson said. “We met through a mutual friend.”

Paterson pops down the window next to his captain’s chair to eject a long-lens camera into the crisp air to capture a few shots. Quite the photographer himself, Paterson is a co-author of the book, “Mosquito Fleet of Puget Sound.”

The crew aboard the Joe is just one of the groups counting birds this day — other groups cover the land portions divided into geographic portions to count every bird in sight, from Fife to the Port of Tacoma, out to Allison and Lakewood, up to Point Defiance.

The Joe’s route travels out of Gig Harbor, through Hale Passage, out through Carr Inlet by McNeil Island and around Point Defiance, sweeping the coast south of Vashon Island, then back to Gig Harbor.

LaBar and Wright impressively spotted the tiny birds that appeared and disappeared beneath the waves, and they called out the species with little effort.

“It takes a lot of practice,” Wright said. “But we had a really good day out there. The water was very calm, which made it much easier to see.”

The group tallied 52 species of birds — the largest numbers congregated in Hale Passage. Huge groups of seabirds amassed in the inlets of northern Fox Island and Shaw’s Cove. The biggest surprise was the spotting of a Cassin’s auklet off the southern tip of Vashon Island.

“We’ve never seen one of these from the boat — they’re very rare in the Puget Sound,” Wright said. “They’re usually way off shore in the open ocean — they’re definitely a sea bird.

“Anywhere near the land is very unusual,” he added. “They only come to land briefly to nest. He could’ve been pushed in by a storm; they usually show up after high winds or a storm.”

Wright said the weather this year has pushed birds far south into Puget Sound from the north, around Sequim. Extreme weather patterns can be responsible for out-of-the-ordinary birds to get off course and show up far from home.

Hands said it was the surf scoter that got her hooked on birding. The funny-looking black sea bird with white stripes on its wings and a bright orange beak can swallow a whole clam with just a backward tilt of its head.

“Every birder has one bird that got them hooked,” she said. “For me, it was the surf scoter.”

Dec. 13 bird count from the ‘Joe’

Waterfowl:

Canada goose 19

Mallard 76

American wigeon 58

Greater scaup 19

Harlequin duck 5

Long-tailed duck 6

Black scoter 11

White-winged scoter 17

Surf scoter 575

Green-wing teal 1

Common goldeneye 351

Barrows goldeneye 44

Bufflehead 141

Hooded merganser 1

Common merganser 236

Red-breasted merganser 289

Loons:

Common loon 6

Red-throated loon 25

Pacific loon 58

Grebes:

Horned grebe 240

Pied-billed grebe 1

Red-necked grebe 241

Eared grebe 47

Western grebe 1,179

Cormorants:

Double-crested cormorant 268

Brandts cormorant 349

Pelagic cormorant 100

Raptors:

Bald eagle 12

Peregrine falcon 1

Red-tailed hawk 2

Shorebirds:

Dunlin 6

Killdeer 5

Spotted sandpiper 1

Gulls:

Bonaparte’s gull 1,596

Mew gull 1,579

Herring gull 2

Thayer’s gull 4

Western gull 1

Glaucous-winged gull 286

California full 4

Big guys 169

Alcids:

Common murre 96

Pigeon guillemot 204

Cassins auklet 1

Ancient murrelet 24

Marbled murrelet 1

Rhinos 56

Others:

European Starling 20

Stellar’s Jay 1

Rock Pigeon 23

Belted Kingfisher 3

American Robin 211

American Crow 6

Reach Lifestyles Coordinator and reporter Susan Schell at 253-853-9240 or by e-mail at susan.schell@gateline.com.