The nation’s longest-running community science bird project has a new area of survey: Goshen Hole near Torrington. Participants set out Dec. 17 on the group’s second annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count — tallying more than 6,000 winged creatures in a single day.
Zach Hutchinson, an Audubon Rockies’ community science coordinator who lives in Casper, started the Goshen count last year to fill an information void, he said.
“It’s just kind of an area where as far as getting wintertime bird data, it’s just the black hole,” Hutchinson said. “For Wyoming even, it’s fairly underpopulated and fairly un-birded.”
That is despite habitat in the small southeastern county that draws birds not common in the rest of the state.
The new bird count encompasses a 15-mile-diameter circle that centers on what’s known as the Goshen Hole. There, low-lying areas of wetlands and agricultural fields attract many avian creatures in the winter months, Hutchinson said, particularly waterfowl. The area is also home to two large wildlife management habitat areas.
That means big numbers of birds that are “infrequent to uncommon to rare,” elsewhere in the state, Hutchinson said, like cackling goose and snow goose.
Nine birders assisted in last week’s count. They tallied 47 species, including thousands of ducks, dozens of mergansers and three types of falcons. The birders also spotted a short-eared owl — a nomadic grassland creature with arresting black-lined eyes.
The Goshen Circle Christmas Bird Count is the state’s first to be run entirely by graduates of the Wyoming Naturalist Program, according to the Audubon Society. The naturalist program aims to cultivate volunteer citizen scientists to do things like shepherd salamanders or observe moose.
Along with providing scientists with survey information, the Goshen bird count circle can give participants an opportunity to polish their skills and gain the experience necessary to keep the bird counts proliferating, Hutchinson said.
That could help keep the event alive for another century. Volunteers across the Western Hemisphere have left the warmth of their homes on cold December days for 124 years for the Audubon Christmas Bird Count.
The effort has generated an invaluable dataset for understanding bird populations. Around 20 counts have taken place in Wyoming in recent years, according to an Audubon report, with around 120 species tallied annually and the occasional rare sighting of a species like a gyrfalcon or fox sparrow.
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
