Lake County News | California

The Christmas Bird Count will be held in Lake County by the Redbud Audubon Society on Saturday, Dec. 15. This year, more than 2,000 individual counts are scheduled to take place throughout the Americas and beyond from Dec. 14, 2007 to Jan. 5, 2008.

As part of the annual Christmas Bird Count effort, Redbud Audubon Society will present a Bird Identification program for its Dec. 13, meeting at the Kelseyville High School Library, starting at 7 p.m.

The program is designed to familiarize people with common, local, birds that they might see if participating in the local count. The public is welcome, and everyone is encouraged to attend to learn more about local birds, even if they don’t plan to participate in the bird count.

“Each CBC volunteer observer is an important contributor, helping to shape the overall direction of bird conservation,” says Geoff LeBaron, National Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count Director. “Audubon and our partners at Bird Studies Canada, the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and the Boreal Songbird Initiative rely on data from the CBC database to develop Audubon’s ‘State of the Birds’ report and inform Audubon’s WatchList, which is used to prioritize Audubon’s bird conservation work.

During last year’s count, about 70 million birds were tallied by nearly 58,000 volunteers, that number of observers representing a record level of participation. Thanks in part to Bird Studies Canada, the Canadian partner for the CBC, there were 2,052 individual counts across the Americas, Caribbean and in the Pacific Islands.