The Harris’s Sparrow, Zonotrichia querula, which had been visiting our yard in Hillsboro for a week but decided to stop doing so last Sunday, has reappeared. Why is the timeframe of importance? Because of the annual Hillsboro Christmas Bird Count (CBC) which was conducted yesterday. CBC’s are conducted in many places in the world. How Hillsboro came to have one was discussed in the April 2020 issue of The Black Range Naturalist. Part of the CBC event is something called count week. If someone sees a bird which was not reported on count day, during the three days prior and three days after count day, then that species is recorded as appearing during “count week”. The results are not in from everyone and will not be fully tabulated for several weeks, but it appears that a Harris’s Sparrow was not seen on count day. We had not seen it during the three days prior to count day. Well, it appeared today, late for count day, but a “count week” bird.
The Harris’s Sparrow is rare in our area. It is found primarily in the mid to southern Great Plains during the winter and farther north during the summer. We were seeing it here in 2017 and 2018 on a pretty regular basis, however. Then a long hiatus until mid December of this year when one reappeared. In previous years we had seen it at about this time and as late as March.
Speaking of the CBC. "How was it?” you might ask. From my perspective it was terrible, hopefully others had better luck. I suspect that it fullfilled its function, providing an indication of the bird population of a defined area (by species and number of individuals per species), very well. It is just that we appear to be in the midst of a major bird crash. The number of species and the number of individual birds being reported by knowledgeable observers is way down. It may be because we have no water. I took the photo below at the trailhead for Forest Trail 135 which is accessed via Tierra Blanca Road. There has always been water flowing over the rock at this spot. In fact, this spot made the cover of Volume 4 of Walks in the Black Range. There was a small pool but no water flowing over the rock yesterday and no birds.
“Our route” for the CBC runs from the Hillsboro cemetery south to Tierra Blanca Road and then west on Tierra Blanca to the Forest Service Road which runs north. We saw no doves yesterday. In past years we have seen hundreds of doves of multiple species on this route.
-Bob Barnes, Hillsboro