Every year, in the weeks around the Christmas holiday, groups of birders head out across Vermont to tally all the birds they see within a designated 15-mile circle over the course of a day.
The Christmas Bird Count tradition goes back to the early 1900s. In Woodstock, the count has been going on for 50 years — that's according to Kent McFarland, a conservation biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. He says now, there are lots of birds that weren't in Vermont when it started.
"Things like red-bellied woodpeckers, which never even were in Vermont in the summertime, let alone the wintertime — now we find red-bellied woodpecker year round here in Woodstock," McFarland says. "Cardinals. People forget that cardinals weren't in Vermont before seeing the 1970s or so. Carolina wrens are another example."
The Christmas bird count has provided scientists with valuable datasets, he says.
"We've documented and seen with this data over years and years and years of all these changes that are happening in our bird communities — winter bird communities — that are caused by things like climate change," McFarland says.
There are still several counts left that anyone can participate in — in Rutland, Norwich, Island Pond, Huntington, and elsewhere.
Lexi Krupp is a corps member with Report for America, a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and regions.
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