Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Quad 30

One morning, dark and early, in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to head out to Brimson, Minnesota, to conduct my annual Breeding Bird Survey. The survey takes about 5 hours to complete, and is intense—I have to keep track of every individual bird heard or seen at 50 different stops, spending exactly 3-minutes at each one. A single stop may have from one to six or seven singing representatives of a dozen species, plus birds flying overhead, and I have only 3 minutes to make note of each one. I’m not allowed to count if it’s raining or windy. Making the process much easier, my good friend Kathy Hermes records the data while I call it out. Each year we check our schedules and figure out the first date after about June 10 when we’ll both be able to go. On our target date, I drag myself out of bed at 2:15 am, and step out on the front porch to check the weather. Then I call Kathy on the phone to tell her it’s a go, or to go back to bed and we’ll try again the next day. The focused concentration for five straight hours is fun but grueling, and I’m always glad when it’s over.

I’ve been counting the breeding birds on my 25-mile route every year since 1989, and sending in my numbers to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, where data is compiled from more than 4100 survey routes in the United States and Canada. It takes two or three hours to compile my data and send it in via computer, and then I have to mail in all my forms. But this full-day commitment by me and thousands of other volunteers provides one of the most important indices of bird populations available.

One of my Wisconsin friends, Noel Cutright, has been doing his Breeding Bird Survey routes for 30 years now. Noel normally runs several routes each year while I do just one. But this year he’s made a powerful commitment—Beginning May 30 and lasting until the end of June, he’s been running a Breeding Bird Survey route every single day. Some are his own traditional routes, and some he’s been assigned to especially for this project. His first routes were in Ohio, and then he moved on to southern Wisconsin and Minnesota. As the month progresses, he’s moving further north until he ends in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. As with all Breeding Bird Surveys, he’s paying all of his own expenses as a volunteer, including gas and housing, but this year he’s doing something special—he’s treating this project as a “birdathon,” soliciting contributions for every species he sees or every survey he completes. He’s hoping that in 30 days, he’ll complete 30 counts on this 30th anniversary of his own first Breeding Bird Survey, and in the process raise $30,000 for bird conservation, so he’s calling this his Quad-30 Campaign. Every penny of the contributions he raises will go directly to Wisconsin’s Important Bird Areas program—an international program that identifies, helps protect, and monitors habitat in areas of the state that are critical for bird breeding, migration, or wintering.

As of this writing on June 14, Noel has completed 15 surveys and is right on schedule. He’s hoping during the course of this to record a total of 179 bird species—so far he’s at 157. Noel’s hoping through this worthy and exhausting project to get the word out about the importance of Breeding Bird Surveys and to raise money for a very important project for Wisconsin bird conservation. Every day, Noel updates his website so you can see where he is and how his tally is coming. There’s a link at the top of my website, www.lauraerickson.com.