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Winter Bird Counts	Winter Bird Counts - Alphabetic
Winter Bird Counts - By County	Image Map
Overview Map

Winter Bird Counts

Christmas Counts were begun by Frank Chapman in 1900, as an alternative to the Christmas tradition of "side hunts", in which teams, or sides, competed to see who could shoot the most game in a day. But you may not know how that tradition in turn got started. Mike Busam has an interesting article on the Christmas tradition of Hunting the Wren on the Cincinnati Birds web site.

The National Audubon Society has built on the Christmas Count tradition by conducting a series of bird counts, covering all of North America and beyond. The counts are held over a period of two and a half weeks during late December and early January. Each count is done in the course of a single calendar day, within a designated circle 15 miles in diameter. The numbers of each species present that day are tabulated, and submitted to National Audubon for publication. The results have been compiled into a database going back over a hundred years, which has been used by researchers to further our understanding of bird population dynamics. You can find more information about the data, and about all the Audubon Christmas Counts, at http://www.audubon.org/bird/cbc/index.html.

Besides the "official" National Audubon Christmas Counts, many other local organizations conduct other winter bird counts. Some are based on circles, some on counties, and some on yet other criteria. Although equally enjoyable to do, the data from these counts receives far less widespread distribution, and is less useful for research purposes because it is not as standardized.

We have compiled information on as many winter bird counts as we could find. You can search for Ohio counts using the links at the end of this page. If you know of other counts, National Audubon or otherwise, please write to webmaster@ohiobirds.org. More details on the Ohio Audubon counts, including some information that may be missing here, are on the Audubon Ohio web site, at http://www.audubonohio.org/bsc/cbc.html.

Winter Counts - Listed by County

Winter Counts - Alphabetical Listing

We also have two maps of Ohio's winter counts, both created by Craig Rieker. The Smaller Map gives a good view of how the counts are distributed throughout Ohio, while the Larger Map shows more detail, and contains links to each count.