Great Backyard Bird Count is this weekend

It started on Friday – one of my two favorite bird counts of the winter – the annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) and it will last through Presidents Day on Monday. My other favorite bird count is the Howe Christmas Bird Count that is usually held between Christmas and New Years Day, but this year it was held on Jan. 4, due to bad weather.

I enjoy the GBBC because all I must do is sit in my kitchen and watch my bird feeders, counting the birds that visit them for 15 minutes. The Red-shafted Northern flickers will not disappoint me as I usually have from 10 to 15 of them battling for breakfast each morning.

I will keep the number of each species that I see, then I go to my “ebird” page on my computer to fill out my findings for one report. I can do as many of these reports as I want to; and usually I will do two to five each day of the GBBC, taking pictures and watching some area as long as an hour or two.

I love doing multiple reports during the GBBC by hitting different areas with a trip to Deer Parks Wildlife Management Area to watch/count the huge Trumpeter swans along with thousands of Red-winged blackbirds. There is usually a mixture of other songbirds with them. Another place I love to cover is the Henrys Fork of the Snake River from St. Anthony to the Chester Dam.

An evening at the Camas National Wildlife Refuge to watch the Bald eagles come to roost in the large cottonwoods and a morning traveling along the warm Texas Slough in Burton, west of Rexburg are other favorites of mine. But my most favorite area to visit is near Howe, where I can compare the numbers and species of bird with the Howe Christmas count. I usually do this on Monday, when I can leisurely target species like the Virginia rails as they feed in the warm creek north of Howe about six miles. I will try to find the rare Gyrfalcons and see if the numbers of other birds of prey are similar to the count we got at the Christmas count.

Four of us; Steve Butterworth, Kit Struthers, Mark Delwiche and I, counted 3930 individual birds of 36 species on Jan. 4. The most numerous were the Horned larks with 1975 of them with Canada geese in second place with 440 followed by House sparrows with 416. I will be interested to see if most of the 161 Rough-legged hawks and the seven Prairie falcons are still harassing the Horned larks as they were in January.

On my trip to Howe, I will spend a little time in the Mud Lake area to see if the numbers of the hawks and owls are still in that area. Owls are starting to pair up now so they could be active in the early morning or late evening as they begin to hunt and announce their availability for love.

If you have never been involved with the GBBC but are interested in it, you can check out the Merlin Bird ID app or google the Great Backyard Bird Count for more information. If you have been involved in it, you can check on your old eBird account to complete your reports.

Even with the cold weather still harassing us, it is only a month until the snow geese, Tundra swans and the Sandhill cranes start their migration through our area. Hopefully we will get a lot more snow so that the run-off ponds will be large in the Osgood area where many of them will be gobbling up as much food as they can to build up their reserves for their trip north.

Those are some great shows to watch.

Be careful out there as you do not want to be wearing an elk or a deer as a hood ornament, as they are still crossing the roads frequently.