Excitement was building as more than 30 birders, including me, gathered before daybreak on coastal St. Catherines Island last weekend to tally birds amid some of Georgia’s most stunning natural beauty.
It was the annual St. Catherines Island Christmas Bird Count, one of the most intensive Audubon Society bird counts in Georgia.
The 14,640-acre St. Catherines, a remote barrier island that’s part of Georgia’s Golden Isles, is ideal for such an activity. Owned and managed by the St. Catherines Island Foundation, the undeveloped island is devoted to scientific research and conservation. Its many types of natural habitats — vast salt marshes, mature maritime forest, open longleaf pine woods, sandy beach with spectacular bluff — teem with birds and other wildlife.
Here are excerpts from my field notes:
“We are divided into groups; my group covers Area 1 that includes much of the island’s north end. … Day’s first bird is what we conclude is a northern flicker atop a leafless hardwood tree; the bird is only a silhouette in early morning light.”
“Hear several red-breasted nuthatches, a winter-only bird uncommon in Georgia. … In all, more than 130 red-breasted nuthatches are tallied during the day, the most ever in a Georgia count.”
“We stop on the bank of Walburg Creek to see what’s on the water and in the salt marsh across the creek. …Water-loving birds all over the place — great blue herons, great egrets, cormorants, ring-billed gulls, spotted sandpiper, red-throated loon and others…flock of redwing blackbirds erupts from marsh.”
“With my binoculars, I follow a bald eagle speeding low over the marsh. …We see several other eagles during the day — the most bald eagles I’ve seen in one locale outside of Alaska.”
“At the beach, huge rafts of ducks rest and feed in the ocean just offshore. … Most are lesser scaups and black scoters. … Also see large numbers of dowitchers, dunlins, ruddy turnstones and other shorebirds.”
“At supper in the island’s dining hall, the day’s stories are told: Our group reports that we saw a red-breasted merganser among the ducks. … Another group says that bird is no more: They were watching an hour later as an eagle swooped down and snatched the merganser.”
Final tally: 131 species and more than 25,000 individual birds.
IN THE SKY: The moon will be full on Friday — the Snow Moon, as the Cherokee peoples called December's full moon, said David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer. Mercury is low in the east just before sunrise. Venus rises out of the east about two hours before sunrise. Mars is low in the southwest at dusk and sets in the west a few hours later; it appears near the moon Monday night. Saturn rises in the east about three hours before sunrise.
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