Over 10 bird species were spotted during the Great Backyard Bird Count from Feb. 14 until Feb. 17.
Throughout four days, 320 House Sparrows, 23 Chickadee’s, eight Ravens, seven Magpies, four Red-Breasted Nuthatches, seven White-Breasted Nuthatches, 34 Rock Pigeons, five Downy Woodpeckers, 475 Canada Geese, eight House Finches, 12 Northern Flickers, and one White-Throated Sparrow were spotted in Chestermere.
“We get an idea of what’s kicking around,” said Great Backyard Bird Count Organizer, Don Cassidy.
“It’s a global count. There’s a stretch of time where you tack birds for essentially four days,” Cassidy said.
The results of the Great Backyard Bird Count can be found on the eBird Website, at https://ebird.org/home, where all of the data is collected from bird counters around the world.
“You can go any place and see how many bird species were counted on the particular days,” Cassidy said.
Although the species spotted was not surprising for Cassidy, he was shocked that 400 Canada Geese were spotted on Feb. 14.
“The biggest surprise was the number of geese spotted, 400 is a rather massive number,” Cassidy said.
“They were probably floating on the river, but they do fly to the fields in the day time to have lunch and then fly back to the river,” he said.
“One surprise we had here at the house, was that there was a White-Throated Sparrow outside,” he added.
Having a White-Throated Sparrow in the trees was very exciting as Cassidy does not see the species very often.
“When we heard one, we were looking in all of the trees, but they might as well be ghosts,” Cassidy said.
Adding, “For us, that was nice, but we didn’t spot it anywhere. We looked in the trees, but nothing.”
