Blackford Christmas Bird Count

History

The Blackford Christmas Bird Count located in Russell County is one of over 2000 individual counts across the western hemisphere as part of the longest running wintertime bird watching tradition held by the Audubon Society. 

The Christmas Bird Count began over a century ago when 27 conservationists in 25 localities, led by scientist and writer Frank Chapman, changed the course of ornithological history.  On Christmas Day in 1900, the small group posed an alternative to the “side hunt”, a Christmas day activity in which teams competed to see who could shoot the most birds and small mammals.  Instead, Chapman proposed that they identify, count, and record all the birds they saw, founding what is now considered to be the world’s most significant citizen-based conservation effort and a more than century old institution.

A count is set up by selecting a count circle with a designated center and the birds are counted within a fifteen mile radius of the circle.  The Blackford Count’s center is the confluence of the Little and Clinch rivers.  Every species and individual bird is counted within the circle.  The Blackford Christmas Bird Count was first conducted on December 30, 1996, when a group of bird watchers from the Lebanon area got together and counted the birds within the circle.  Robert D. Riggs had been recording the winter residents in Russell County since 1994 and realized the counts in the Bristol, Tazewell, and Wise areas were missing some very good habitats containing interesting species such as the Golden Eagle.  Bob got together with Scott Whitcomb who was the resident biologist at the Clinch Mountain Wildlife Management area and the two studied a topographic map to see which circle center would contain Beartown Mountain, Laurel Bed Lake, Elk Garden, and Clifton.  The confluence of the Little and Clinch rivers located at 37 degrees 0' N by 81 degrees 55' W provided a good land mark for the count center, and the circle included the above mentioned locations.  Bob named the count the Blackford Count because of the proximity of the count’s center to Blackford.

The next step was to recruit some local bird watchers to help with the count.  Tom and Laverne Hunter volunteered to count the Clifton area and have been participants on each of the 12 Blackford Christmas Bird Counts conducted.  Joey Harrison who lived in Lebanon helped Bob and Scott count as much of the count circle as they could cover during the 24 hour period.  These five individuals counted 50 species of birds and 1426 individuals during the first count.  After the first count Joey has moved out west to work in the timber industry and Scott has moved to Michigan to continue his work in wildlife biology.  Dave Worley contributed to the count by letting us know what birds he saw at his feeders that day.  The creation of the Blackford Christmas Bird count has contributed significantly to the winter resident list of the state of Virginia particularly with the species of the Golden Eagles.  No one realized up to that time how high the wintering population was until the count was conducted.

Contributed by the founder of the count, Mr. Robert D. Riggs

Historical CBC Data for all count circles can be found on the Audubon web site here.  You can use option C with count code VABD for the Blackford Count Circle.

Preliminary results from the Blackford CBC conducted yesterday, December 31, 2011, indicate that five teams with a total of 16 counters found 67 species (slightly above the average number of 63 species) with 3205 individual birds (well below the average of 3922 individuals).  We found record high numbers of Canada Geese (224), Ring-necked Duck (7), Hooded Merganser (9), White-crowned Sparrow (148), and House Sparrow (48).  One new species was added to the list.  Dave Worley found an Indigo Bunting.  For the second year in a row, no one found a Ruffed Grouse.  The only blackbird we found was the Eastern Meadowlark (4).

There is an Excel spreadsheet with all fifteen years of count data (plus this year's preliminary numbers) here.  This spreadsheet has some interesting statistics calculated such as number of species and number of individuals for each of the years, the number of years a species has appeared in the count along with high and low counts for each species.  High counts for species which have appeared more than one year and which have a maximum of more than one individual are highlighted in red.  A preliminary report for the 2011-12 count can be found here (PDF format).

You can download a report form for participants here (in MSWord format) or here (in PDF format).  This form contains every bird that has ever appeared at least twice on the Blackford CBC.  The order of the birds follows the order used on the Audubon web site for CBC data.