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Christmas Bird Counting: How many birds in the flock?
With Christmas Bird Counts starting all across North America next week it is timely to begin thinking about how good you are at counting birds in a flock. In this case, it is a flock of Starlings congregating in the evening before settling on a roost for the night. I guessed very low. Most people do. But it is a skill you can improve upon.
One technique that is mentioned, is to group the birds in a flock into tens, or fives. whatever is convenient. And then say that if a group of ten takes up this much space, there must be 60, say, in the flock.
Another way is to take a picture of the flock and count the birds in the picture. This is a great way to improve your skill. I originally estimated 350 or so in this flock. There are really 533!
This show part of the original photo cropped where the last group of 10 is.
And there are a variety of sites on the web that help. Here are a few:
And for those who realy want to delve into the subject, there’s a book called Bird Census Techniques. And there are an number of other technical references