The 2023 Eugene Christmas Bird Count (ECBC) is 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 article on this 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
2023 ECBC Home Count Information
By Marcia Maffei, 2023 Eugene Christmas Bird Home Count Coordinator
If you’d prefer to not participate on a Eugene Christmas Bird Count field team this year, consider being an ECBC Home Counter. From the comfort of your own home, you can record the birds you see at your feeder, in your yard, or overhead. Your bird count will be included in the final report to the National Audubon Society.
To participate as a Home Counter, first, check to see if your home is in the official Count Area.
FMI: contact Marcia Maffei, birds2count@gmail.com or 541.501.1280. Please leave a message. (Editor’s note: Should you happen to take any clear photos of birds at your feeder, you are invited to submit them to quailkaren1@gmail.com for possible publication in The Quail.)
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The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is a long-standing program of the National Audubon Society, with over 100 years of citizen science involvement. It is an early-winter bird census, where thousands of volunteers across the US, Canada and many countries in the Western Hemisphere, go out on one calendar day to count birds.
Local events take place in Eugene, Florence, Cottage Grove, and Oakridge at the end of December, and are open to anyone interested in birds. If you are just starting to get interested and want to learn more, this is a fun and exciting opportunity to learn about birds and birding from experienced birders. For dates, see our December events calendar.
You may also contact Dick Lamster at 541-343-8664
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