As bird counters at Salem Lake walked past a group of domesticated ducks, team leader John Haire said that they wouldn't be counted because they are not wild. When he spotted a mallard duck among the domesticated ducks, he told Sue Rupp, who was adding birds to a list, not to count it either.
"That one has fallen in with a bad crowd," Haire said.
Twice a year -- once in winter and once in the spring -- members of chapters of the National Audubon Society throughout the country go out and count birds.
Yesterday, the Audubon Society of Forsyth County had 36 people on 10 teams counting birds as part of the society's 109th-annual Christmas Bird Count. As the society explains on its Web site, data collected by the counts help researchers and others study the long-term health of bird populations across North America and identify threats to birds and habitats by providing a picture of how bird populations change.
Along with the four-member team at Salem Lake -- Haire, Rupp, Rupp's husband, Randall, and Linda Davis -- there were teams at such places as Historic Bethabara, Tanglewood Park, the Children's Home on Reynolda Road, Washington Park and the Archie Elledge Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Davis is the chapter's compiler, and, after getting reports from all the teams, she will put together a total for the county. The spring count turns up significantly more species. Around here, the May count might include 135 species, Davis said, and the total for the winter count is usually fewer than 100 species.
At Salem Lake yesterday, the birds on the team's list included the horned grebe, the pied-billed grebe, the red-breasted merganser, the bufflehead, the American coot, the ring-billed gull, the kingfisher, the crow, the blue jay, the junco, the great blue heron, the Canada goose, the ruddy duck and the downy woodpecker.
If you see a gull in these parts, chances are excellent that it's a ring-billed gull. They get around. The other day at Salem Lake, Haire had spotted one that had been tagged. With his bird scope, he was able to read the identification information on the tag. When he looked it up online, he found that the bird had been tagged in a Wal-Mart parking lot 30 miles west of Boston. The tagger had used Cheez-Its as bait and caught the bird with a net.
Birders share a love of nature and the outdoors. They also tend to be people who are both patient and curious, said Davis, who traces her love of birding to her father, Mike Gibson. He made sure that his children spent a lot of time outdoors, she said, and instilled in them a sense of reverence for the natural world. Birders find that their hobby takes them into related fields of knowledge as well.
"It can lead you into learning more about seasons, weather, plants, insects," Haire said.
For some birders, it's enough that birding provides a pleasurable focus for being out and about. Others take it quite seriously, Sue Rupp said. "There are people who will fly to Arizona to see one bird."
Haire looks on birding as an excuse to go places that you might not go otherwise. Birds have drawn him to North Dakota and South Dakota, and to the Rio Grande in Texas. His friends in Texas assured him that he had gone to the most disagreeable part of the state, but for him, all the lovely birds made it a great place to be.
People who like to hike can find that accompanying birders is annoying, Rupp said, because birders are constantly stopping to look at this or that bird. Nonetheless, they can get in a lot of walking as they keep searching for that next bird. That was the case yesterday as team members, bird scopes and binoculars in hand, worked their way farther and farther along the path around Salem Lake.
"You never know," Davis said. "We might get out here and see 10 more species."
■ Kim Underwood can be reached at 727-7389 or at kunderwood@wsjournal.com.
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