This is our 15th year leading the Loudoun County Christmas Bird Count and over the course of the 15 counts, we have counted over 380,000 individual birds!  We hope to encounter over 25,000 birds again for this year’s count (and maybe hit 100 species!) and with your great spotting and involvement, we can do that!

We use a count circle to organize our count and that circle is broken down into sectors that are assigned to expert birders who are the team leaders.  When you sign up, we’ll assign you to a team or you can let us know if there’s a specific team or area within the circle where you’d like to bird.

Come on out and join the fun – for part of the day or the whole day – it’s a great chance to meet new people, talk birds (and learn about birds), and contribute to a really important effort to gather data on bird populations nation-wide.

The data that we collect will be used for our local Loudoun County Bird Atlas and will be sent to National Audubon for inclusion in this nation-wide bird population census.

It’s easy to do because you can do it from the comfort of your home and it’s a great way to get to know the birds that live in your neighborhood.

Cornell charges a small fee to cover some of their expenses but you get some really nice resources when you sign up.  You can enter your data online too which is nice because then, if you continue year after year, you have a nice repository of information about your backyard birds.

By participating, you’re also contributing to a growing body of knowledge about the birds across North America and you can contribute it to our local effort to document species by signing up for our Loudoun County Bird Atlas project.

“A Big Sit? What in the world is she talking about?” (some of you may be asking) It’s another excuse to get outside and enjoy nature and bird, silly! And… while you’re out there, collecting data, you’re contributing to bird population studies, so it’s all good!

The Big Sit was started officially by the New Haven Connecticut Bird Club. Bird Watchers Digest keyed in on it as a great activity and helped promote it nation-wide and now people all over the world are doing it! 

It’s pretty simple….and there are prizes that you can win.

Some have called the Big Sit a tailgate party for birding – and that’s a pretty good characterization.

What you do is first, identify a 17-foot diameter circle that you and your friends and family will bird from.  It can be located anywhere you want – in your yard, on your deck, at a park or sanctuary, wherever – but the key is that you can only could birds that you id from sitting in that count circle.

Then, on Oct 9, get yourself all set up in your circle with a comfortable chair, snacks, binos, beverages, and do your birding.  That’s it.

Once you’re done, send in your data on the Big Sit site. It’s would also be so helpful if you send your data to our Loudoun County  Bird Atlascoordinator, Spring Ligi, and she’ll get it entered into our database as part of that project.

So, let’s sit around and do some birding this weekend! You can visit the Big Sit web page to register your Big Sit, see some video interviews and get more information.

Congratulations to all our volunteers on completing our third breeding season for the atlas, bringing us past the half way mark of this exciting 5-year project!  As fall approaches, we can shift our focus to the migrants passing through our area. Earthquakes…hurricanes…anything is possible!

August Highlights

1.     Swallow-tailed Kite observed in the Lincoln 4 block.

2.     The Poolesville area continues to be productive with reports of Pectoral Sandpiper, Horned Lark, Cliff Swallow, Yellow-throated Warbler, as well as Turkey, Grasshopper Sparrow, and Dickcissel fledglings. A Dickcissel was also reported in the Waterford 3 block.

3.     Loggerhead Shrike observed on top of a roof in the Purcellville 4 block.

4.     Broad-wing Hawks observed passing over Snickers Gap Hawkwatch (Bluemont 1).

Atlas Progress
71 atlasers have spent 3,085 hours in the field documenting 34,550 sightings. You have recorded 233 species, with 100 of these species having a confirmed nesting status. Field cards have been reported for 46 blocks and 4 blocks are considered “complete”.

Interesting in the Loudoun County Bird Atlas Project?  Read more about it here and sign up with our coordinator, Spring Ligi.

One coalition that we support is the Choose Clean Water Coalition, and given that hurricane Irene is coming our way and we’re about to see a lot of water, I thought I’d highlight that here today.

The Choose Clean Water coalition brings together people and nearly 200 organizations from Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia, working together to help everyone in the region choose clean water.

You can follow the work of this coalition through Facebook, Twitter, and through Podcasts, as well as through the website which summarizes key issues.

Clean water is truly one of the very few things we cannot live without, yet here in the US we certainly take it for granted. 

Here in Loudoun, we live in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, and some serious work needs to be done to restore the habitat and thereby the water that runs through our communities.

If you’re interested in learning more about water quality and getting your feet wet locally, check out our Stream Monitoring Program.  It’s a lot of fun!

As morning broke though, the cloud cover was high so we were hopeful.  Eight teams, with 59 people, gathered at their meeting spots a little before 9am.  It was still cool at that time, around 75 degrees, and with the exception of the Blue Ridge Center, the morning had a slow start.

By about 10am, the butterflies were showing up. The cloud cover and slight breeze made for a more comfortable day than we’ve seen in past years and temperatures reached the mid-80s – perfect for butterflies!  But where were they? 

Across the board numbers were down. In terms of diversity, we had 43 species (compared to 47-49 in past years) but it was the number of individual butterflies that was profound, as we recorded just 2312 individuals. This is the lowest count we’ve seen since 2004 and a huge departure from the last two years where we saw well over 4,000 individuals each count. 

While numbers were low across the board, we especially noticed that the swallowtails, fritillaries and sulphurs were almost absent in locations where they are typically seen and in general their numbers seemed to be cut in half.  Monarchs were low at just 52, compared to 193 in 2009 and 82 in 2010.

The Red-banded hairstreak was higher than in past years and the American Copper showed up at a couple of different locations, giving many participants a “lifer”. The Common Buckeye, Eastern-tailed Blue, Silver Spotted Skipper, Dun Skipper and Zabulon Skipper all had healthy numbers on par with past years.

All in all, a nice day for the count but the lack of butterflies has had a lot of us asking what happened? We didn’t have the best day for the count with the cloud cover but it was warm enough that the butterflies would have been out if they were around and the showy swallowtails could not have been missed. 

It all comes down to weather and habitat for butterflies.  The cool spring with its rain storms may have been too much for the adults to handle. That, followed by the heat we had through July, may have made it so the caterpillars/chrysalids couldn’t survive or develop. 

In the weeks leading up to the count, I scoured the listservs and across the country fellow butterfly counters were reporting low numbers and asked the same questions we did. I just wondered if our count would bear out the same truths, and it did.

What are the butterflies telling us on a national level? In the fall, the North American Butterfly Association, where we submit our data, will have the national data compiled. It will be interesting to see the conclusions they draw.

You can view our Loudoun County data from 1997-2011 on our website: http://www.loudounwildlife.org/Butterfly_Count_Summary_Data.htm

Our thanks go out to everyone who participated in the count this year! We couldn’t have done it without you!

If you missed the count this year, mark your calendars now for next year! We hold it on the first Saturday every August.

The count takes place on the first Saturday in August each year – so this year it falls on Saturday, August 6th.  We start at 9:00 a.m. by meeting up in our teams at designated meeting spots and we count throughout the day, visiting gardens, sanctuaries and wild roadside locations all within our count circle.

You can participate for the whole day or just part of the day – your choice – but we could sure use your help on a team!

To learn more about the annual butterfly count, see past years data and sign up, visit our Butterfly Count webpage.

Hope you will join us!  All experience levels are welcome!

Each year we hold the count, we encounter anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 butterflies, across more than 40 species, in this one day of counting!  If we’re going to count that many butterflies again this year, we need your help! You can sign up online.

To organize the count, we use a count circle that we divide into sectors. We have team leaders that are responsible for covering specific sectors and when you sign up, we’ll assign you to a team (or you can let us know if there’s a specific team/area in the circle where you’d like to count).

It’s really a great day and is such a great way to contribute to the collection of data on butterfly populations!

International Migratory Bird Day is  held on the second Saturday in May in the U.S. and Canada and in October in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean each year and it’s a day where we celebrate and bring attention to one of the most important and spectacular events in the Americas – bird migration.

Millions of birds – large and small, having wintered in points south, are returning both to our area and points north to breed and continue the cycle of life.

The photo in this post was taken at Horsepen Preserve in Cascades during our IMBD walk there a few years ago. It is of a White-eyed Vireo that Stan Shetler, our walk leader, pointed out and helped us all get good views of as it foraged through the trees.

By standing witness to this great event, we not only learn about and engage in this continued heartbeat of our natural world, but also gather and report data on the specific species that travel through or breed in our area, thereby contributing to bird conservation.

I hope you’ll join us on one of our many walks on International Migratory Bird Day – it’s a wonderful day of sharing knowledge and building friendships.  You’ll encounter birds you know and new ones that have just flown in! Each of our walks is led by experienced birders so it’s a great opportunity for beginners and veterans alike.

Visit our Loudoun County IMBD page for more information and sign up.

Here is her story:

(Williamsburg, VA)—The odyssey of Hope, a whimbrel carrying a  satellite transmitter, continues to amaze scientists.  Hope was originally captured on 19 May, 2009 on the southern Delmarva Peninsula of Virginia.  She left Virginia on May 26 and since that time has logged more than 21,000 miles (33,000 kilometers) flying between a breeding territory on the MacKenzie River near Alaska and a winter territory on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.  On Friday (8 April, 2011), Hope returned to Virginia following a 75 hour, 1,850 mile (2,900 kilometer) flight out over the Atlantic Ocean.
 
During the course of two full migration cycles, Hope has clearly demonstrated how distant locations are interconnected in the life of migratory species and how their conservation requires collaboration on a multi-national scale. 

For three consecutive springs, Hope has returned to the same creek in Virginia where she has fed on fiddler crabs preparing for a transcontinental flight to her breeding grounds.  The creek, located in the  the Conservancy’s Virginia Coast Reserve,  is part of the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network, a network of international sites considered critical to  populations of declining shorebirds. 

Hope’s breeding grounds on the MacKenzie River are part of an International Important Bird Area and  one of the areas of highest conservation value in Canada.  Efforts  are ongoing to protect the area considered by many to be one of the most pristine watersheds remaining in North America. 

For the past 2  years, Hope has wintered at Great Pond, a Birdlife International Important Bird Area on St. Croix.  Protection of long-distance migrants like Hope requires that countries recognize the importance of vulnerable populations and work together toward effective conservation solutions.
 
Hope is one of several birds that have been fitted with state of the  art 9.5-gram, satellite transmitters in a collaborative effort by the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary – Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia Coast Reserve of  The Nature Conservancy to discover migratory routes that connect breeding and winter areas and to identify en route migratory staging areas that are critical to the conservation of this declining species.

Updated tracking maps may be viewed online.

http://www.ccb-wm.org/programs/migration/Whimbrel/whimbrel.htm
 
Satellite tracking represents only one aspect of a broader, integrated investigation of whimbrel migration.  During the past 4 years, the Center for Conservation in partnership with The Nature Conservancy has used conventional transmitters to examine stopover duration, conducted aerial surveys to estimate seasonal numbers, collected feather samples to locate summer and winter areas through stable-isotope analysis, and has initiated a whimbrel watch program.  Continued research is planned to further link populations across staging, breeding, and wintering areas. Funding has been provided by The Nature Conservancy, the Center for Conservation Biology, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program, Georgia Department of Natural Resources, The Toronto Ornithological Club, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, and the Northern Neck Audubon Society.