Here we are in the middle of—no, we’re not thinking of the holiday season—Christmas Bird Count season!

In case you’ve forgotten, Christmas Bird Counts are organized bird surveys carried out during the period from about two weeks before and after Christmas. There are tens of thousands of them that take place across the world but the largest numbers of Christmas Bird Counts are done in the U.S. and Canada. Each Christmas Bird Count is a survey of all the birds in a 15-mile diameter circle. Teams of observers each spend the day covering their smaller section of the total circle, identifying every bird species and attempting to count each individual bird seen or heard. The totals for each team are added together to get a grand total estimate of the number of birds of each species present in the count circle that day.

Christmas Bird Counts have been underway for more than a century, and some counts have taken place in the same exact location for nearly that long. That means that the Christmas Bird Count, which is organized and the results archived by the National Audubon Society, provides one of the longest running bird population monitoring programs in the world.

We have been participating in Christmas Bird Counts for more than 35 years ourselves and have many great memories and stories of our own or that we have heard about from our friends.

One of our favorite Christmas Bird Count adventure stories has to be of one of the first Christmas Bird Counts we did together—it was also one of our first dates! We drove a yellow volkswagon beetle with no heat up in the below-zero predawn darkness to The Forks. Arriving at dawn, we were already freezing despite the layers of blankets we had draped across ourselves to try to hold in a little warmth on the ride up. Unfortunately, the temperatures remained bitterly cold throughout the day and despite hiking for miles on various old logging roads and seeing great birds like gray jays, boreal chickadees, and black-backed woodpeckers, we continued to get colder and colder. At that time there were no stores, restaurants, or businesses of any kind that were open in the area either so there was no place to go to get warm.

As the pain of slowly freezing toes began to increase (at least we hadn’t gotten to the point where we had lost feeling in them!) we got desperate enough to turn on the heat. (You see, the car DID have heat but the heat exchange boxes had so rusted through that if we turned the heat on, the warm air was laced with exhaust fumes and dangerous carbon monoxide.)  The heat was tantalizing but not worth risking our lives for, so warmed ourselves just enough to get us through the rest of the afternoon, leaving the windows cracked, to be safe.  

We toughed it out for a few more hours and practically cried on the hour-long ride to a restaurant in another town, where we met the other Christmas Bird Counters and drank mugs of hot chocolate while we massaged our ice cold feet. Our tears were as much for the frozen feet as they were for having missed a Great Gray Owl after all that one of the other teams had found in their area (this being the age before cell phones and all).

We haven’t participated in that particular Christmas Bird Count since, but we have continued birding together, including on many other Christmas Bird Counts, and the rest, as they say, is history!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds.”