Tucson Bird Count

‘Tis the season, and Alison I were out bright and early (she was bright, I was early) to run our Tucson Bird Count route. This is a ‘citizen science’ project monitoring urban bird populations in a rapidly growing city, and every year it gets lots of people out birding in areas that just wouldn’t get visited otherwise at all. The TBC is a fairly new count, but it has already turned up some very interesting phenomena; much of what we know about the decline of Verdin, for example, is based on data gathered by TBC volunteers over the last several years.

We survey a small portion of northwest Tucson, with sites evenly split between residential neighborhoods and industrial tracts near the Santa Cruz River. This year we tallied 36 species, a record for our route. The most abundant bird is always a columbid, and this year the more than 300 White-winged Doves handily beat out our 70-some Mourning Doves. For the first time, we recorded a Eurasian Collared-Dove, too, so with Rock Pigeon and a few Inca Doves, it was a 5-pigeon day.