Dark-eyed juncos have turned up on nearly every Snake Valley count. Joseph R. Danielson, Great Basin National Park gallery (public domain).
The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is the world's longest-running community science project, begun in 1900. Each year between December 15 and January 5, birders count every bird they can find inside a 15-mile-diameter circle.
The Snake Valley circle
Melissa Renfro started the Snake Valley count in 1996. Its circle takes in parts of Great Basin National Park — especially the Lehman, Baker, Kious Basin and Snake drainages — the towns of Baker and Garrison, Pruess Lake and nearby lands.
Count day, 2023
- When: December 15, 2023.
- Who: 19 all-day participants plus several part-day ones — the biggest turnout in the count's 28 years. Volunteers joined park staff and partners from the Nevada Department of Wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management, the Great Basin National Park Foundation, the Eastern Nevada Land Coalition and West Consultants; Western National Parks Association supplied snacks.
- How: teams walked eight routes, looking and listening.
What they found
- Birds: 3,702 — up on the previous eight years and about average for Snake Valley (some years have seen huge tallies of mallards and horned larks). The all-time total is now 102,360 birds.
- Species: 64, the most ever on this count.
- Firsts: a Say's phoebe, hanging around the resource building where it nests in summer, and California scrub-jays far up Big Wash.
- Rarities: a snow goose, tundra swans, golden-crowned kinglets and a merlin, among others.
- Hard-to-get birds: gadwall, Clark's nutcracker, western bluebird, white-breasted nuthatch, red-naped sapsucker, ruby-crowned kinglets, Cooper's hawk, mourning dove, common merganser, belted kingfisher and prairie falcon.
Canada geese are regulars on the count; this snow goose was a surprise. Joey Danielson.
The winter regulars
These species have turned up on at least 27 of the last 28 counts:
| Group | Species |
|---|---|
| Waterfowl | Mallard |
| Raptors and owls | Golden eagle, red-tailed hawk, rough-legged hawk, great horned owl |
| Woodpeckers | Northern flicker |
| Jays and crows | Pinyon jay, Woodhouse's scrub-jay, black-billed magpie, common raven |
| Songbirds | Horned lark, mountain chickadee, Townsend's solitaire, European starling, dark-eyed junco, song sparrow, Brewer's blackbird, American goldfinch, house sparrow |
Join a count
CBCs run across the U.S. and in some other countries. To take part or learn more, see Audubon's Christmas Bird Count.
Sources
Based on "Snake Valley Christmas Bird Count Breaks Record" by Gretchen Baker, ecologist, first published in The Midden, Great Basin National Park, Summer 2024, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The cover and goose photographs are by Joey Danielson; the junco is from the park's NPS gallery, marked public domain.
In these publicationsGreat Basin National Park
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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