Ken Wright and Marg Holm look for birds near “The Throne” during the Oliver-Osoyoos Christmas Bird Count on December 31.

by Doug Brown

On December 31st the 33rd Oliver-Osoyoos Christmas Bird Count was held with 33 participants spending the day searching the area to find as many birds as possible. Birders from Penticton, Summerland, Kelowna, Lillooet, Omak and Vancouver joined members of the local naturalist club in our annual effort to census the local birds. Participants divided up into small groups with each group being assigned a specific section of our area to be covered. The overall area covered is a 15 mile diameter circle which stretches from the top of Mount Kobau in the west to Anarchist Mountain in the east and from the north edge of Oliver to south of Boundary Point across the border. The 15 mile diameter circle is the standard count area used by all Christmas Bird Counts throughout the Americas.

Over the day the participants drove for 485 kilometres and walked a further 133 kilometres in their efforts to cover as much of the area as possible in the search for birds. It was quite a nice day to be out with no precipitation and the temperature ranging from 5.3 to -3.9 degrees.

This year there were 21816 birds of 107 species found. This is the lowest number of birds in the last 6 years but the number is well above the long term average. Our species total means that our count again finished first among interior BC bird counts, beating out closest rivals, Penticton with 99 species and  Kelowna with 92 species. We did manage to add one new species for our count this year, Bewick's Wren. This species began moving into the southern interior from Washington State about 6 years ago but had eluded us on our count until this year. The addition of the wren brings our all-time total to 162 species recorded on our count. The best bird of the count this year was a Mountain Bluebird found up in Richter Pass. Although Western Bluebird is a fairly common winter resident, Mountain Bluebird has only been found 4 times in our 33 years of Christmas Bird Counts. Other sightings of interest included Pacific Loon(8th record), Cackling Goose(5th record), Virginia Rail(9th record), American Three-toed Woodpecker(8th record), Black-backed Woodpecker(6th record) and Yellow-rumped Warbler(6th record). Our most abundant species this year was European Starling, a species that has dramatically increased since the growth in acreages of grapes. Certainly our worse miss this year was Bohemian Waxwing. This species comes to our area each winter, often in large numbers, to feed on berries such as Mountain-ash and Russian Olive but numbers each year are very erratic. Despite this it's the first time that Bohemian Waxwing has been missed on the count.

After the count the participants got together for some hot food and to recount the day's findings. Overall it was a great count with a thoroughly enjoyable time had by all.