Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy

As we kick off this new year, we have a lot of great programs and plans lining up!  The LWC Board just had its annual strategic planning retreat and a key theme as always is to engage lots of people in our programs and activities so together we can learn about Loudoun wildlife and habitats and work on ways to preserve and protect them into the future — besides, it’s fun to make new friends and get outside and explore nature together!

I’ll be posting our strategic plan to our website in the next few weeks so you can see what our plans are (and volunteer if you want) but in the meantime, I wanted to do a quick posting on the various ways we can stay in touch, share stories, ideas and sightings and learn together about Loudoun nature, wildlife and the great places we have here. We welcome your feedback and ideas so please feel free to reach out – we really appreciate your input! Please share this with friends and anyone who might be interested:

Monthly Email Announcement: Sent on the first of each month, this email has all of our upcoming programs and field trips for that coming month. It often includes events that didn’t make it into the Habitat Herald by the time we had to go to print, and it has all sorts of photos of wildlife and plants taken right here in Loudoun. If you’re not already on the list, fill out our Sign Up form and click the box that says “Add me to the Email List”.

Website:Our website has all sorts of information on our programs and activities as well as resources you can use around your home and with kids. There are book reviews and links to other great organizations, data and information from our various monitoring programs, puzzles and games, a map of Loudoun’s Great Places, updates on our conservation advocacy issues, and other news. It’s updated at least monthly with new information and materials that you can access. http://www.loudounwildlife.org/ 

Blog:  Well you obviously know about our blog already since you’re reading this posting here. For the blog, you can come to the blog page and read the postings at your leisure and you can also subscribe to it and have the posts sent to you once a day in a digest form. If you’re not already subscribed, you can do so but entering your email address in the subscribe box in the right column of this page (just scroll down a bit and you’ll see it)

Podcasts: Podcasts are the audio files I put together on different wildlife and habitat news and information local to Loudoun county. I try to do these about once a week (or so) and they run anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes depending on the topic.  You can subscribe to the podcasts through iTunes (and other pod feeders) or you can simply listen to the episodes on your computer.

Facebook: Yes, you can visit Loudoun Wildlife on Facebook too and become a fan . On Facebook, we can share wildlife stories, ask (and answer) questions, post quick announcements, share stories and videos we find, chat about what’s going on around Loudoun, and so much more. We also have photo albums posted here so we can share some of our sightings from the field. LWC Facebook Fans can post their own photos to the page and use the other facebook tools that are set up too.

Twitter: Well, when we heard that people “tweet” on twitter, we just had to be a part of it!  Tweets are short and sweet posts of our sightings and other news that’s going on. It’s also linked to the blog so when there’s a new blog posting it’s announced on twitter too so you can read it and share it. Come on over and check out the Loudoun Wildlife Twitter page.

Habitat Herald Newsletter: And last but certainly not least, our quarterly newsletter, the Habitat Herald. Now, I’ll try not to be biased but I think this is an excellent newsletter – filled will all sorts of great educational information of different aspects of our environment, habitats, animals and plants, as well as upcoming programs and field trips and a great quarterly children’s article called The Adventures of Zoom and Compass. The newsletter is pulled together by a great group of volunteers who are involved with researching and writing articles, editing them, doing the layout and mailing them out to our members. You can view past issues on our Habitat Herald page of the website.

The results are in!  Here’s our report from Joe:

The 13th Central Loudoun Christmas Bird Count, sponsored by the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy (LWC), took place on Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009.

I want to thank all the counters, for helping with this count, one of about 2,000 different Christmas Bird Counts, part of the longest and largest citizen-science effort in the world.  I especially want to thank the sector and subsector leaders for your help as without you these counts would not be possible.  We also appreciate all the private and public landowners who give us permission to visit their properties to survey the birds there – those permissions make an incredible difference in the numbers and diversity of what we find!

For those of us owling, the day started with promise under clear skies, a nearly full moon, and temperatures in the mid-30’s at 4 am.  Unfortunately that quickly changed as the temperature dropped to 25 at 7 am accompanied by a freezing fog.  Roads that had been simply wet an hour before were dangerously slick.  And while the fog was beautiful, it was also cold.  While the temperature ultimately warmed up to the low 50′s later in the day, making it a great day to be outside, most ponds remained totally frozen.

The 92 participants, including many beginner birders and ten under 19, found 87 species, a bit less than average, and 28,353 individual birds, about average.

The highlights of the count included
- a Loggerhead Shrike found by Gerco Hoogeweg’s team
- a single Long-eared Owl found by Bob Abrams, and four Barn Owls, the most we’ve found since our very first year
- 2 Gray Catbirds
- 3 Brown Thrashers, a high count
- 5 Red-breasted Nuthatches in two different old pine plantations
- 38 Hermit Thrushes, a high count
- the raptors included 30 Bald Eagles, our second highest count, and 18 Cooper’s Hawks, our highest count
- interesting sparrows included 15 Trees (low), 29 White-crowned (low), and 7 Chipping (a high count)
- a single Pine Siskin and 6 Purple Finches, both way down from last year, an irruption year.

Two teams had seven woodpecker-days with one team finding all seven woodpecker species in 40 minutes on the same farm and then finding all seven woodpecker species again later in the day.  A total of 20 Red-headed Woodpeckers, a high for this count, were found throughout the county.

With most of the count’s ponds frozen and the streams and Potomac in flood, it was hard to find a lot of waterfowl. 

To make it more challenging several of the larger bodies of water, which do not totally freeze, were totally fogged in when visited early in the morning.  Nonetheless the team led by Dori Rhodes did see a flock of Snow Geese flying overhead while Gerco Hoogeweg’s team located two Red-breasted Mergansers, surprisingly the first found on this count.

Afterwards about half the participants met at the Red, Hot, & Blue for the Tally Rally, coordinated by Mike Friedman, to share tales of their day.   They not only ate a lot of tasty meat choices but vegetarian fare as well.

We hope you will join us on one of our future bird walks, or even better, one of our counts or help with the Loudoun County Bird Atlas. 

To find out about our upcoming events or to see a comparison of this year’s count to previous years check out our Christmas Bird Count page.  At the bottom of that page we have reports from past years as well as a summary of our data since we began the count 13 years ago. To compare the Central Loudoun CBC to others check out www.audubon.org/Bird/cbc/.

Joe Coleman, Count Compiler
540-554-2542 or jcoleman@loudounwildlife.org

Many thanks to Constance Chatfield Taylor and Peter Kaestner for sending over photos from their birding adventures! Additional photos can be seen on our Loudoun Wildlife Facebook page.