The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) will be held Saturday, December 16 for the Grand Marais CBC, which is a 7.5-mile radius circle from a point three miles south of the middle of Devil Track Lake.
A participant can cover as much area or as little as you’d like. Anyone from a novice to a professional can help. The Christmas Bird Count is open to birders of all skill levels.
Needed are walkers and drivers as well as feeder watchers—anyone that can identify birds and count the highest number of a single species in an area as well.
We’ll also need any species of birds that you see in the count circle, but not on the count day. This “count week” happens for the three days prior and three days after the Saturday count.
What is needed?
For count day, you’ll need a guidebook, binoculars, a scope for lake birding, warm clothes, warm boots/Yak Traks, a log book to record your observations, and a keen and quick eye to count our winter rarities!
If you are a feeder watcher, keep your feeders full up and through count day to encourage birds to be there on that day; have various foods available in feeders and on the ground to entice as many species as possible.
While the Audubon’s National CBC effort began Christmas Day 1900, the first known Minnesota CBCs were conducted on Christmas Day 1905 in Minneapolis and Red Wing. During those last 111 years, the Christmas Bird Count has been conducted uninterrupted in the state and has grown to include almost 70 census circles and involved more than 28,000 participants.
Every year more than 1,000 participants canvas the state to conduct the survey. These participants have logged nearly 77,000 total hours, traveling approximately 548,000 miles. The Minnesota CBC has tallied over 8.5 million birds which covers 201 species.
Today, over 55,000 volunteers from all 50 states, every Canadian province, parts of Central and South America, Bermuda, the West Indies, and Pacific islands count and record every individual bird and bird species seen in a specified area. Each counting group completes a census of the birds found during one 24-hour period between December 14 and January 5 in a designated circle 15 miles in diameter, about 177 square miles.
Please contact Jeremy Ridlbauer at sundew@boreal.org or 370-0733 to notify us about the area you can cover or what feeder or area you’ll be watching.
We’d like to contact you or have you contact us on the count day to report results. We’ll meet at 4:15 p.m. at The Blue Water Cafe on count day to compile results from anyone who can make it there at that time.
The count circle covers:
Highway 61 to Lindskog Road and north, some of County Road 60, the Gunflint Trail to the landfill road, the Pine Mountain Road to the backside of Elbow Lake, and Devil Track Road to Bally Creek Road, Ball Club Road to The Grade, Pike Lake Road, and Highway 61west to Cascade Lodge, and all of the lakeshore between Lindskog Road and Cascade Lodge.
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