Christmas Bird Count
December 25, 2008
Christmas in Antarctica! We celebrated the holiday by doing an Audubon Christmas Bird Count (CBC). The idea is to keep track of how many individual birds you see throughout the day. Thousands of CBCs take place each Christmas season all over the world, and tens of thousands of birders participate every year, but this was the first CBC ever conducted in Antarctica (the closest established count is in the Drake Passage). After Michelle, Kirsten and I added up our tallies, our “official” CBC result was:
270,885 Adelie Penguin
79 South Polar Skua
6 Snow Petrel
2 Emperor Penguin
1 Wilson’s Storm-Petrel
Five species was an impressive daily total for Cape Crozier, given the storm-petrel was just the 2nd one we’ve recorded this season, and nearly all the Emperor Penguins have already gone to sea (we almost missed them entirely). Estimating the number of Adelies required a GIS program with aerial photos, on-the-ground spot totals, and several levels of multiplication factors, but we eventually arrived at a conservative, ballpark number for count purposes. We decided not to count baby penguins in nests, which would have added another hundred thousand or two!
Michelle cooked us a delicious Christmas dinner of Cornish Game Hens, mashed potatoes, and asparagus. Otherwise, today was no different than any other day. We deployed two satellite tags on penguins, recovered another one that came back, searched for banded birds for a few hours, performed routine maintenance (I changed out our poo bucket, for instance), and entered data. We had nice weather, sunshine and 15-30mph south winds. At about midday we spotted the Swedish icebreaker ship, Odin, passing by a few miles offshore on its way from McMurdo Station, where it breaks a shipping lane through the ice every year. It was the closest company we had this Christmas.
Christmas in the U.S. is just beginning. Have a merry one!
Two Of The 270,000 Penguins We Counted Today
One... Two...
3 Responses to 'Christmas Bird Count'
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WOW, you have been a busy boy! Is that a low count for Skuas considering there are baby birds about?
Nice that you had a decent feed today and chores have a way of mounting up if left unattended especially poo buckets.
But for the wind, you could have been bunbathing.
Arija
26 Dec 08 at 2:33 am
Something tells me you all are going to have the record high count for a few of those species!
Merry Christmas down under (really down under!)
Bill Schmoker
26 Dec 08 at 5:30 am
Perhaps the only CBC actually done on Christmas Day?!
Jamie
26 Dec 08 at 7:41 am