A Summaryof Christmas Bird Counts in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Bermuda Daniel K. Niven1 and Gregory S. Butcher2 1 National Audubon Society, Illinois Natural History Survey, 1816 South Oak Street, Champaign, IL 61820;
[email protected] 2 National Audubon Society, 1150 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036;
[email protected] Introduction Since the first group of New York City “birders” set out to count birds on Christmas Day in 1900, as an alternative to the annual bird hunt that was common at the time, Christmas Bird Counts have continued to grow in popularity (Butcher 1990). People participate for many reasons, including the social and educational aspects of gathering to count birds, the competitive sport of it, and, more recently, because the conservation value of the data collected on these counts has been further recognized (Sauer et al. 2004). The majority of counts have been conducted in the continental United States and southern Canada. As each year passes, the value of this extensive long-term database, currently with counts from approximately 2000 locations A Blue-gray Tanager (Thraupis episcopus) and Christmas Bird Counters in Colombia—two things and data on more than 500 species, continues to increase. likely to be encountered during the CBC season in CBC data have been used in hundreds of scientific publi- South America. Photos/Jorge Botero cations (LeBaron 2010), and recent analyses of these data have proved useful for assessing the abundance, distribu- tion, and trends of North American wintering birds (Link et al. 2006) and for assessing distributional impacts of cli- mate change (Niven et al.