2023 Eugene Christmas Bird Count Dec. 31st

The 2023 Eugene Christmas Bird Count (ECBC) is on Sunday, December 31, 2023. Yes, this is New Year’s Eve, but we will be done by dusk, which will give you plenty of time to still party hardy. The date is our regular day within the normal three-week Count Period and will be our 82nd Christmas Bird Count. Guidelines for social distancing will be up to the Team Leaders and each team member. Please be respectful of other’s safety concerns.

Our 27 Teams will be looking for birds in their assigned areas within our designated 15-mile diameter Count Circle. Each Team Leader will manage their team according to what works best for them. If you were on a team last year, the Team Leader should be contacting you with information for this year. If you have not heard from the leader by the first week of December, contact him, her, or Dick Lamster at maeveanddick@q.com or 541.343.8664. Other birders wanting to participate in the Count this year can also contact Dick. If you’d prefer to count birds from the comfort of your home, see the Home Count info on the Christmas Bird Count page.

Last year the weather was quite warm with no rain for the ECBC. When the lists of all 153 people who were in the field all day were combined with the 102 Home Counters, we had identified 133 species! Five more species were seen during Count Week. These three figures were about average for our count over the past two decades.

We recorded 80,801 individual birds last year. This is encouraging because it was the highest total in the past five years except for 2019, which included an unusually high number of starlings, and perhaps indicates a new upward trend in the number of individual birds seen.

You can view results of last year’s ECBC as well as all the other CBC’s in North America at christmasbirdcount.org. Our count code is OREU.

For the fourth year in a row, we will not have a Chili Feed Countdown at the end of the day. In the past, this was a really fun ending to a long day of birdwatching. In the years immediately preceding the pandemic, more than 100 people had attended. We hope we will all feel safe enough to return to a similar in-person, inside Chili Feed Countdown next year.

We hope you can join us for this year’s ECBC. We look forward to sharing this fun and important endeavor with you on Sunday, December 31, 2023.

by Dick Lamster, Count Coordinator