Bob Zaremba and I were in a field in west Cobb County shortly after 5 a.m. last Sunday, listening for owls at the start of the metro area's annual Christmas Bird Count. It was cold and windy, with misty rain, but the chance to do some birding with Zaremba, one of Georgia's leading birders, was irresistible.

Charles Seabrook (ENLARGE)

Birder Bob Zaremba of Marietta listens for calling owls an hour before dawn last Sunday during the day-long Atlanta area Christmas Bird Count. Zaremba recently set a Georgia birding record -- spying 326 species in a single year in the state.

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Zaremba, who lives in Marietta and is a projects manager for IBM, recently set a Georgia birding record — seeing or hearing 326 bird species in the state during a single year. He eclipsed the old record of 324 set by former Lt. Gov. Pierre Howard of Atlanta.

At the outset of last Sunday's count, Zaremba told me not to expect any records for the day. "The drought we're having and the wind don't make for good birding," he said. Birds, he noted, tend to stay hidden during windy periods, and a blowing wind makes it difficult to hear the hunkered-down creatures calling and singing.

Still, the wind let up long enough for us to tally a respectable 48 species by lunchtime. They included a flock of eight wild turkeys, which crossed the road in front of us just after we turned left onto it.

"Luck helps," Zaremba said. "If we had turned right, we would have missed the turkeys."

The Atlanta-area Christmas Bird Count includes tallying all the birds seen or heard during a 24-hour period within a 15-mile-diameter circle centered near Due West Elementary School in Marietta. The circle is divided into 16 areas, with a birding team assigned to each.

Our area was near Acworth in west Cobb. It included woods, fields and marshes along stretches of Allatoona Creek and its tributaries, and subdivisions along Cheatham Road and other nearby thoroughfares.

We started out more than two hours before dawn to count owls. To attract them, Zaremba played their recorded calls on his iPod. From out of the woods we heard the horselike whinnying of two screech owls — "not a bad way to start the count," Zaremba said.

But we had no luck with barred owls and great horned owls, probably because of the wind. A bonus of being out so early, though, was seeing several shooting stars, part of the Geminid meteor shower.

When dawn broke, we were at the edge of a marshy field hoping to see woodcocks fly over during first light. Just as we were about to give up, a lone woodcock sped by, making its characteristic twittering sound. We also spied a flying pileated woodpecker and a flock of wood ducks, and watched a beautiful redheaded woodpecker peck on a snag in the marsh. A remarkable sight was the sudden appearance of a kettle of turkey vultures and black vultures. "I've never seen vultures soaring so early in the morning," Zaremba said.

We speculated that they were zeroing in on a dead white-tailed doe — an apparent victim of a car collision — that we saw lying near the road.

In another marsh, we looked and listened for marsh birds, particularly Virginia rails and sora rails, but none appeared. The probable reason, Zaremba said, was the drought. "Normally, we'd be standing in 8 to 10 inches of water here, but it's dry now," he said.

Later in the morning, at the edge of a thicket, Zaremba again played the screech owl call. This time it was to attract "regular day birds," which are drawn by the owl's call. In short order, we saw tufted titmice, Carolina chickadees, ruby crowned and golden crowned kinglets, a hermit thrush and a small flock of blue jays.

But we found most of the regular birds — including sparrows, goldfinches, cardinals, nuthatches, robins, downy woodpeckers and American crows — at feeders and on lawns of houses in the subdivisions we drove through. In one yard, a yellow-bellied sapsucker clung to a tulip poplar trunk.

Our prize of the day was five eastern meadowlarks on the grassy field of a Cobb County park used by model airplane enthusiasts. Meadowlark numbers are declining in metro Atlanta as rapid development chews up the bird's grassland habitat. "It has been a while since I had meadowlarks in my count area," Zaremba said.

With all 16 areas reporting, the total count was 10,136 individual birds representing 90 species. Other highlights: a horned grebe and a snow goose.

In the sky

The Ursid meteor shower will be visible through Monday night, says Fernbank Science Center astronomer David Dundee. Look to the east from about midnight until dawn.

The moon is full Sunday night. It's known as the Long Nights Moon because this month is when nights are at their longest and darkest. Saturday, the first day of winter, had the longest night of the year. Venus rises out of the east an hour before sunrise. Mars rises out of the east at sunset and appears near the moon tonight. Saturn rises out of the east just after midnight and is near the moon Friday night. Mercury and Jupiter are too close to the sun for easy observation.