The counting circle tallied 214 blue jays during its 2025 Christmas Bird Count. Photo / Brian Barnabo
On a quiet unpaved road the Saturday before Christmas, John Lowry scanned the skies, ready to jot tallies on a clipboard for his contribution to one of the longest-running citizen-powered data projects in North America.
Every year, the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count draws tens of thousands of birders (and sometimes “Sobs” and “Fobs” - spouses and friends of birders) for the 126-year-old event that blends birding and data science.
Lowry, co-organiser of his designated circle - a 25km-across area where birders gather annually - and 20 others select a day between December 14 and January 5 to conduct their count.
The participants divide the circle into seven areas and fan out with scopes and binoculars, eyes and ears sharply attuned so they can count every bird they see or hear from dawn to dusk.
The long-standing database from the Christmas count has helped scientists track bird population declines and changes in the environment, said Ben Haywood, who directs community science for the Audubon Society.
Haywood said the bird count has spread over the years to South America and the Caribbean, which last year pushed the Audubon Society to a record 2693 counts by more than 83,000 participants.
“We have over a century of really standardised data - people going out in the same places, at the same time of year, to look for the same species,” Haywood said.
“That is a really valuable data source because it’s more robust than just randomly going out at any point.”
Standing on a dirt road roughly 80km from Detroit, Lowry plays a bird call from an app on his phone in the hope of drawing a response from a nearby red-breasted nuthatch before he’s interrupted by the distant crack of a rifle.
A neighbour is shooting at a target - not the birds - so Lowry waits patiently to hear one call. He soon gets a reply, from a white-breasted nuthatch, and adds it to the tally.
“For some, hearing the bird is the experience,” said Lowry, 62, who has been doing the Christmas Bird Count for at least 30 years.
A century earlier, gunshots would be the defining sound of a Christmas bird outing, according to Marshall Iliff of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which studies birds and conservation of their habitat.
Iliff also helps manage the eBird project, a global open-source platform of bird-sighting data.
“The [bird count] really started as a way to switch from shooting birds on Christmas to counting birds,” Iliff said, adding that the pre-1900s tradition in which hunters competed to shoot the most birds led to some species being decimated.
In 1900, Frank Chapman, an ornithologist with the American Museum of Natural History, urged hunters to trade their rifles for binoculars. A century later, the count has exploded in popularity.
With the Christmas Bird Count on pace to set another record for participation, Lowry thinks people in increasingly isolated times are drawn to activities that build community.
It’s also an inclusive hobby for people who are blind or have mobility issues, he said.
People can participate from their homes if they live in count circles, reporting the tallies taken from their front windows or backyards.
“There’s a way people can take part in this that doesn’t have to be, you know, stalking through marshland,” Lowry said.
Lowry, for his part, does like to stalk.
He drives down bumpy unpaved roads, criss-crosses parks and gathers with fellow birders on the shore of a half-frozen lake to make sure no bird goes uncounted.
Brian Barnabo, 40, is one of the birders who joined Lowry on Saturday.
He described going from a casual bird observer 12 years ago to someone who now plans holidays with birding in mind.
It was an easy habit to fall into: Barnabo started noticing more interesting birds after he got his Australian shepherd mix, Bear, and was taking him for regular walks.
“It just blew my mind in the first couple of weeks,” Barnabo said, describing the yellow-headed prothonotary warbler as the bird that sparked his interest.
“Then I went out and bought every [birding] guide there was.”
Sean Bachman, 60, another member of the circle, started birding as a 10-year-old living on a lake in Howell, Michigan.
“One Christmas, I got up and decided to count all the birds by the lake and never stopped,” he said.
Bachman said he saw the bird population change as the region transformed from rural farmland to suburban housing tracts and golf courses.
“You lose habitat, fields; meadow birds are harder to find,” Bachman said.
“You’d go out in the spring and get 10 or 20 warblers. Over the years, I notice fewer birds around.”
Haywood, of the Audubon Society, said the Christmas Bird Count underscores the power of everyday citizens using birding skills to support scientific research.
Decades of data has backed up hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and publications like the Audubon Society’s 2025 State of the Birds report, he said.
The report presented a “pretty sobering reality” of how birds across most habitats have suffered major population declines since the 1970s - a worrying sign given that animals are proxies for environmental health, Haywood said.
“If the habitats can’t support birds, they’re not healthy for other wildlife or humans,” Haywood said.
Iliff, of Cornell, said the declines don’t have to be the end of the story; they can be a springboard for positive change.
The best-known example in birding communities is the bald eagle, which was endangered by the late 1960s because of the overuse of an insecticide that was found to weaken the bird’s eggshells.
Data helped usher in legislation that banned the use of the insecticide, DDT.
By 2007, bald eagles had been removed from the endangered species list.
As the counting day drew to a close for Lowry, Bachman and Barnabo, their tallies were filled with woodpeckers, a short-eared owl, chickadees and three swan species.
They were about to head to their final observation spot when they stopped to look up.
Barnabo quickly snapped photos of a bald eagle soaring overhead.
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