| Southern Marin Christmas Bird Count | ||
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Saturday, December 29, 2007 Dear Potential & Past Southern Marin CBC counters: The Marin Audubon Society once again invites you to participate in our annual Southern Marin Christmas Bird Count on Saturday, December 29, 2007. We will be looking forward to your participation in this great tradition of citizen science – the 108th count nationally and the 32nd for Southern Marin. Please RSVP right away – early signups help me get area assignments out earlier. Let me know if you would like to continue at the area that you birded in years past. Otherwise, I will assign you to an area that needs coverage. An alternative to birding a specific count area is being a bird feeder watcher from the comfort of your home. I will e-mail area assignment letters. Area leaders will also receive a snail-mail packet with team member contact information, tally forms, maps, and the previous years’ area data. To minimize paper use, if at all possible, please correspond with me via e-mail. Count results are transmitted via the internet. You can access the database of all counts nationally at www.birdsource.org. Our count name is CAMC – Marin County Southern. Check it out. A compilation dinner following the day’s birding will be held from around 5:00-8:30 pm at the Tamalpais Valley Community Center. Join us for a fun evening count-down compilation, the usual camaraderie, and dinner. Directions: To get to Tam Valley, take the Stinson Beach/Hwy 1 exit off I-101, which turns into Shoreline. Follow around the bend and bear left into Tennessee Valley Road (at the fruit stand). Go ¼ mile to Marin Avenue and turn right. Then make an immediate left into the parking lot. The catered dinner starts at 5:30 pm and costs $11. To reserve a space at the dinner, please send an email to wendyfeltham@comcast.net. To keep with our pot-luck tradition, we encourage everyone to bring desserts to share. As announced last year, we are excited that this is our first 100% "green" dinner, so please remember to bring your own napkins, cup, dishes and eating utensils. Please join us again this year by filling out the form which will be emailed to Sue Ellen Raby, the compiler. 1. To be assigned a count area, please provide the following information. 2. To reserve a dinner, please provide the following information.
For those of you not familiar with Christmas bird counts, to quote from www.audubon.org/bird/cbc: "More than 50,000 observers participate each year in this all-day census of early-winter bird populations. The results of their efforts are compiled into the longest running database in ornithology. Simply put, the Christmas Bird Count, or "CBC", is citizen science in action. Up until the turn of the century, people commonly engaged in a holiday tradition known as the Christmas "Side Hunt". They would choose sides and go afield with their guns; whoever brought in the biggest pile of feathered quarry won. Conservation was in its beginning stages at the turn of the century, and many observers were becoming concerned about the indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife, and concurrent declines in bird populations. On Christmas Day 1900, ornithologist Frank Chapman, an early officer in the then budding Audubon Society, called for an end to the slaughter. He suggested that, rather than shooting birds, people count them instead. So began the Christmas Bird Count." Southern Marin CBC The Southern Marin count circle is 15 miles in diameter and ranges from Terra Linda to Sausalito, and Bolinas to San Pablo Bay. Volunteers are assigned to 23 separate areas within this count circle and identify and record every individual bird within their area of this count circle. The compiler combines each area's total species and individual birds, and sends this on to National Audubon. To learn more about Christmas Bird Counts and to see specific data from all count circles, go to www.birdsource.org (click on BirdSource project, choose Christmas Bird Count; on the CBC web page choose Current Year or Historical Results—we are count circle CAMC). |
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By Area (data since 1978):
Alpine
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| Marin Audubon Society, Box 599, Mill Valley, California 94942-0599 | ||