By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
For 125 years, the National Audobon Society has collected bird data via its Christmas Bird Count. Cheyenne Bottoms and Barton County got involved in the count in 1974, and Kansas Wetlands Education Center Director Curtis Wolf said that 50-year stretch makes for a solid set of data locally and afar.
"The ultimate goal of the Christmas Bird Count is to provide baseline information on these bird populations across all of the U.S. and really see what bird populations are doing," he said.
READ MORE: All-time highs observed during 2024 Christmas Bird Count
Hundreds of counts are conducted across the United States each year between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5. The Cheyenne Bottoms Count now includes a 15-mile radius around the Bottoms and includes most communities in Barton County. The area included in the count has changed slightly over the last 50 years.
"It hasn't been done every year and several of those, the location of the count was a little different," Wolf said. "It was more of a Barton County-type thing, then it was shifted a little bit and it's included all of Cheyenne Bottoms and a good portion of Barton County."
The National Audobon's website allows for easy tracking of the Cheyenne Bottoms count since 2013. Given the time of the count in December each year, temperatures have varied from five degrees in 2016 to highs in the 50s this year. Twenty-three volunteer counters recorded 89 species in 2017, and 13 volunteers counted just 76 species on that chilly 2016 day. Since 2013, as few as 61 species have been documented on count day and as many as 97 species in 2020. This year's counted featured all-time highs of snow geese (269,077), green-winged teal (15,145), mourning doves (199), and white-crowned sparrows (182).