By Steven Thyme
An intense orange sherbet sunrise flooded the sky just after 6:30am. The sun’s rays had been peeking over the horizon for half an hour as we’d hiked through the Lake Placid Scrub Wildlife and Environmental Area. Now we were standing on the far south end of Lake Placid watching the natural world wake up around us. Tri-colored Herons, Great Egrets, Great Blue Herons, Green Herons, Wood Ducks, Red-winged Blackbirds – even American and Least Bitterns had been flying around the lake calling to each other, starting the business of the day.
We were soaking wet – we’d hiked through shin-deep water amid grasses and vegetation taller than our heads and covered in dew (watching out for alligators and water moccasins, of course!) – though we’d never been happier.
My team of three all work at Archbold Biological Station and we were participating in the 36th annual Lake Placid Christmas Bird Count (CBC). The CBC is an international annual birding tradition and one of the oldest community science projects in existence. Every year since 1900, birders across the country (and increasingly, the world) fan out in their local area to count every bird they can find. The results are compiled in a national database – it’s one of the most extensive and important datasets we have to understand the status of our nation’s birds.
The Lake Placid CBC – like every CBC – searches for birds in a 15-mile diameter circle. The circle is split up among teams; each team scours their area over a 24 hour period within a two week period around Christmas. The 2024 Lake Placid CBC was on December 19.
Once established, the circles remain the same year after year. Many of the sections in the circle also remain the same, and the same people will return to search their section each CBC. Participants come from a variety of backgrounds – many in Lake Placid work for Archbold Biological Station. Others are members of the local Audubon Society or other conservation organizations. Not all of them have a background as birders. One member of my team studies rare plants in Archbold’s Plant Ecology Program. He’d never been out birding at all before, much less at dawn wading through the wetlands surrounding a lake (early that morning he’d said, “I’ve never gotten this wet doing field work before!”). Yet we all share a passion for the outdoors and for conservation.
Dawn is the best time of day if you’re looking for birds, and participants in the Christmas Bird Count plan where they’ll be at sunrise and how they’ll get there with precision. In the Lake Placid CBC, 39 people, split into nine teams, met early enough to drive and walk to their preferred starting location – typically a lake or a wetland. Watching a brilliant Florida sunrise with the birds was our reward for starting so early.
My team spent the rest of the day driving to new locations around the Lake Placid Scrub. We waded through wetlands, drove over sugar sand, and hiked through recent controlled burns. We exchanged texts throughout the day with other teams – it was satisfying to know that so many other people were out across Lake Placid engaged in the same activity. To end the day, we watched the sunset over Lake Placid (this time, dry in our truck bed) as Soras, a tiny secretive wetland bird, called from the reeds and grasses on the lake’s edge.
After sunset, when the last owls had been counted and we were done straining our ears for Eastern Whip-poor-wills, we all met up at Archbold Biological Station for dinner to swap stories from the day and for the official “countdown,” when we tally the total number of species we saw.
This year we saw 133 species in the Lake Placid area, an increase over recent past, but historically low. Last year we saw 129 species and the year before, 122. Between 1987 and the 2000s the Lake Placid CBC regularly found 140-150 species, with a high count of 155 species in 1995.
We also used to find those species in greater numbers. In 1990, participants found 500,000 Tree Swallows. And while that was a banner year for the swallows, it’s not anomalous. We counted 300,000 in 2000, and have averaged about 41,000 a year since 1987. These declines are seen in virtually all songbirds – Common Yellowthroats, a warbler species, declined from a high of 925 in 1992 to 37 in 2024.
Our observations match trends across the country and the globe. The 2022 Audubon Society’s State of the Birds report showed “plummeting bird populations across almost all habitats.” A 2019 study in the journal Science found that bird numbers declined by 29% from 1970-2019 – a loss of 3 billion birds.
Ducks and other waterfowl in our CBC have also declined radically, although likely for different reasons than the songbirds. In 1991, participants counted 15,000 Lesser Scaup (a duck species); this year, 41.
Dr. Hilary Swain, Archbold’s Executive Director, has been participating in the Lake Placid CBC for thirty years. Her section is southern Lake Istokpoga, which she and her team search with an airboat. Over dinner, Dr. Swain told me that in the past they routinely found thousands, even tens of thousands of ducks on Lake Istokpoga. This year, they saw five total ducks of any species. Scientists think that many of the missing ducks are over-wintering further north rather than dying off. In general, studies have found that waterfowl are faring better than songbirds.
Bird numbers are declining for a variety of reasons. My own day-to-day work at Archbold involves conservation work for Florida Scrub-Jays, which are threatened primarily by habitat loss. All the CBC participants engage in conservation work throughout the year to protect wild Florida – the CBC is one of the most fun and social methods we use for conservation.
While the next CBC isn’t until December, 2025, if you’re interested in participating or getting involved in conservation sooner, send an email to avianecol@archbold-station.org.
